I Dreamed My Own Death and Woke Up Wanting It

The night before, we had argued. Mariela and I had those fights that started over something stupid and ended up stirring up years of buried resentment, but that one was different. That one got out of hand. The words turned to stones and, at some point, she stopped shouting and looked at me with a calm that was more frightening than any insult.

“You’re sleeping here tonight because it’s late,” she told me. “But tomorrow at dawn you’re leaving. And I don’t want you to come back.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say. There are lines you don’t know whether they’re real or just exhaustion talking, and I chose to believe it was the latter so I could keep breathing.

We went to bed in the same bed, a narrow double bed that suddenly seemed like a battlefield with an invisible border down the middle. She pulled one of the blankets apart and wrapped herself in it, turning her back on me and leaving me the sheets and a thin coverlet that barely kept me warm.

The hours dragged on forever. Two bodies side by side, avoiding each other, careful that not even a finger crossed the line. I listened to her breathing and tried to guess whether she was asleep or pretending. Three, maybe four in the morning came and went. I don’t remember the exact moment sleep got the better of me, but it did.

***

In the dream, I got up early. I showered in silence, turning on no more light than the bathroom light, and left the house without breakfast. I didn’t wake her. I didn’t leave a note. I went straight to the workshop, a small place I’d bought years ago to store my tools, especially my carpentry tools, that refuge that smelled of wood and oil where I always hid when everything else was falling apart.

I spent the morning adapting the place so I could live there. I cleared out a corner, dragged in an old mattress I had stacked away, hung up a blanket to serve as a curtain. By afternoon I had improvised something like a home. I lay down on the mattress, exhausted, my head full of Mariela, of what I had said to her, of what I hadn’t said, of all the years that suddenly seemed to be ending in that dusty room.

And then I felt the pain. A fist closing inside my chest, my left arm going numb, an impossible weight on my ribs. I had never had a heart attack, but the body knows before the mind does, and I knew what was happening to me. I tried to get up and couldn’t. I tried to scream and nothing came out. The front door was locked from the inside, bolted shut, and there was no one on the other side to hear me.

The pain grew and then, all at once, it stopped. I lost consciousness.

***

I don’t know how long after that it was, but I saw myself lying there on that mattress, lifeless. I was floating above the scene, looking down at myself like someone looking at a stranger’s photograph. My face was pale, my eyes half-open, my mouth slack. It was me and at the same time it couldn’t have been me.

I was even more terrified when I saw the spider. One of those big black ones that show up in damp corners. It was walking over my shoulder toward my face. Its thin legs brushed my lips and I thought it was going to crawl into my open mouth, but it kept going, crossed over to the other shoulder, and disappeared into the crack between the bed and the wall.

Time became confused. It passed at an impossible speed before my eyes while I stayed there, staring at my own corpse. The skin went from pale to a darker color, and then it started to swell. It was maddening to watch myself rot, glancing toward the door from the corner of my eye, waiting for someone to miss me, for someone to notice I was gone and come to the workshop. But nobody came. Nobody knocked. The neighborhood went on with its life as if I had never existed.

And I cried. I cried seeing myself like that, in that miserable state, abandoned, with not a single person remembering me. Was I such a bad person? Did I deserve to die like this, alone, rotting in a room that smelled of old wood?

***

Suddenly, sirens. Knocks on the door, one after another, getting louder and louder until the wood gave way. Firefighters came in. Some neighbor had called because of the smell, they said, and only then had someone realized something wasn’t right. Behind them, pushing her way through, Mariela came in.

She was screaming. I don’t know if it was pain, guilt, or grief, but it was the kind of scream that comes from somewhere very deep inside, the kind you can’t fake. She fell to her knees beside the mattress. And I, floating there, wanting to touch her, knew exactly what she was thinking.

She was thinking about our last conversation. About how we had fallen asleep that night so far apart from each other, in a bed one meter thirty-five wide that suddenly seemed like an ocean. She was thinking that the last thing she had said to me was for me to leave and not come back.

I would have liked to go down to her, hold her, whisper in her ear that the fault had been mine too. Tell her I forgave her and ask her to forgive me. Tell her that I had never stopped loving her, not even in the worst of our silences. But it was already too late. Even if I shouted with all my strength, she couldn’t hear me. Death has that cruelty: it lets you see what you lost just when you can no longer get it back.

And with that enormous sadness squeezing my chest, I woke up.

***

I woke up with a wet face. So wet that the pillow was damp beneath my cheek, soaked with tears I had cried in my sleep. It took me a few seconds to understand where I was, to recognize the ceiling of our room, the gray light coming through the blinds, the fan’s hum. I wasn’t dead. There was no workshop, no spider, no corpse swelling up.

Mariela was sleeping beside me, her back turned, completely oblivious to what I had just lived through in my dream. She was breathing slowly, peacefully, and just seeing her alive there, a handspan away from me, loosened something in my throat. I looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand: seven thirty in the morning. It was due to go off at eight.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand. The fight from the night before was still there, intact, waiting for us when we woke up fully. Her order that I leave was still standing. But after dreaming my own death, after seeing myself rot alone and forgotten, no fight seemed as important as the warmth of the body next to me.

I took a chance. Not knowing how she would react, I decided to move closer to her.

***

Mariela was on her side with her back to me. I settled against her, spooning her, and carefully lifted the blanket she was wrapped in. I pressed myself to her slowly, holding my breath. Feeling me there, in an instinctive gesture, pure habit from years together, she pushed her ass back until it was nestled against me.

I sleep almost naked, just the top part of my pajama, and in summer not even that. She does the same, and that night was no different from the thousands of nights we had slept together. I slipped my hand under the long T-shirt she wears to sleep and left it still at the level of her belly, feeling the rise and fall of her breathing. Her bare ass rested against me.

I had no intention of penetrating her. I wasn’t looking for sex. All I wanted was to feel her body, her heat, her smell, that female smell I knew by heart and had never stopped wanting, not even on the worst days. I wanted to remind myself she was still alive, that she was still with me, that the workshop and the spider had been nothing but a nightmare.

But she, half asleep, had another idea. She started moving. Small, slow circles of her hips, pressing against me, seeking me. My body reacted as expected. I felt myself slip in little by little, slowly, helped by the wetness that was already plentiful between her legs, as if she too had been wanting this for hours without daring to say it.

We stayed like that for long minutes, without speaking, without looking at each other, communicating only through movement. No reproach from the night before fit into that silence. She was breathing harder and harder, biting the pillow, until she trembled all over against me in her first orgasm. She didn’t stop. She kept moving, looking for the second, and I let her, burying my face in her hair, wanting that moment never to end.

And then, just as she was going for the second, the alarm went off.

***

The sound shattered the spell in one blow. She went still. I stretched out my arm and switched off the alarm. The room filled again with gray light and reality, and reality, against all my expectations, had not changed.

Mariela got out of bed without saying a word. And while she dressed she made it clear to me, more with a look than with her voice, that she still wanted me to leave. That what had just happened had been her way of saying goodbye. One last encounter, one last tremor, a full stop between the sheets. The truth is only she said goodbye, because I never got to finish. I was left halfway there, my body wanting and my head full of a dream that still squeezed my chest.

Now I’m in the office, in front of a screen I’m not looking at, with a coffee going cold. I should be working, and all I can think about is one thing: whether to go back home tonight or not. If dreaming death serves any purpose, it should serve for this, for understanding that the warmth of someone beside you is worth more than being right in a fight. But I don’t know if she understands it the same way. I don’t know if there’s still a bed waiting for me or if this time the dream was a warning of what’s waiting for me.

Maybe tonight I’ll find out.