What It Is To Love A Dream (Fiction)

Sreeyan died on April 23rd, 2022, between 7 and 10 pm. The police people of San Francisco found him ashore on Kirby Cove at 11 pm. His face pressed against the pebbled ground and his clothes were tinged by the cove’s red and brown sand. But the coroner estimated he’d already been dead for a few hours before his body was brought to land. 

Perhaps one would assume that jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge would be quite a noticeable stunt. Perhaps one would assume at least a dozen cars jammed behind the dozens of other ones would have slowly crept by the suicidal Sreeyan. Perhaps one would even assume that the mechanical sloths who lacked eyes and rolled by incapable of perceiving a person vaulting themselves over rusted rails would at least have passengers who looked left or right. 

I am surprised, therefore, that in consideration of all that could have occurred and would have occurred, I instead find myself further surprised that I couldn’t recall the features of his face.  His physical characteristics refused to hurtle themselves into reality, and so it took news reporters monologuing about the sophomore at Stanford from the safety of their cable channels further secured by their detached anchor voices plastering Sreeyan’s face on my television screen for me to once again remember him as anything more than my imagination. 

But perhaps oddly, I’ve never forgotten how he lightly pressed his pen against paper or how it jumped up and down his notebook, solidly staining his pages. Or the care Sreeyan took to never let his pens bleed through the individual pages of his notebooks. 

I sat behind Sreeyan during the two years of middle school Spanish. Our first year, I had gotten to class five or ten minutes late, and the only seat left was in the front of the class at a wobbly desk that grazed Miss. Peregrine's standing table and sat on the left side of Sreeyan. I took the seat and that day, like most days, I folded my arms and lay my head down. 

Spanish was one of those classes that no one cared much about. Although Northern California’s Hispanic population paled in comparison to Southern California’s, a decent number of students grew up speaking the language. Even if you were Asian like Sreeyan and me or Indigenous, or White, or Black, or belonging to a racial group or ethnic identity that didn’t often, during youth, learn Spanish, it was still easy: Do the homework and you passed. 

When Miss Peregrine looked up from one of her smutty books, we’d sometimes be there…Sleeping, or gathering around - as if for an oral tradition - to share stories. Legends told and Tales recited of the raw-dogging of whimpering virgins in the front seats of mothers’ minivans or narrowly escaping police raids on obscurely located parties by outrunning, in the pitch black no less, un-leashed German Shepards.

It was during one of these days in the 7th grade - I can’t remember the exact date - that I fell in love with Sreeyan. And it was the only time Sreeyan ever listened to a story. Something about José’s retelling of fucking his ex-girlfriend’s elder sister intrigued him, or perhaps bothered him, in a way that none of our other folktales ever did or would. 

“Get the fuck out of here, José. I’ve gone to school with you since elementary. If you had sex on top of your mom’s car, she’d have pulled you out of school and had you picking grapes” I said.

“Ishaan shut the fuck up. If you gave your elephant a rest every now and then and came to school in a car, maybe you’d make it on time. Anyways, I had Jessica pinned against the hood and I just started ripping shit off with my teeth. And I’m telling y’all she had bigger boobs than her sister.” José said. 

It was the comparison José made between breast sizes that incited Sreeyan to look up from his notebook. 

“I started sucking on her tits and slid my finger into her soaking wet pussy. And she started wailing and calling me Papi.”

José was full of crap. His ex-girlfriend’s elder sister didn’t exist, and I knew that because his ex-girlfriend didn’t exist. He was - and is - my best friend. I knew he hadn’t ever held a woman’s hand and he sure as hell had never kissed anything. His audience of pubescent boys, however, was enthralled…I imagine they were fantasizing about their own imaginary partners and pinning them against their mom’s Toyota.

“Why did she want that from you?” Sreeyan said. 

Our group of four or five twelve-year-old boys looked up at him. The drastic difference between an actual girl and José’s caricature of women was unbeknown to us. And yet José’s story still felt like something we should hide. Even if it was common knowledge that nearly adult women were especially willing to be pinned down by juvenile schoolboys that had slept with their younger siblings and couldn’t legally drive.

“Well, I’m glad you don’t see a reason to fuck me. But women like sex and to be treated like that. They like guys who’ll take control,” José said.

“Do you have to want sex with someone to like them?”

“Someone’s into you and all they want is you. And I don’t mean like hanging out with the boys kind of want. If you like someone you have sex with them. That’s what relationships are.”

“Have you ever wanted to date someone just to be with them a lot? Not really wanting to do all that other stuff?”

“My parents, Ishaan over there, my old ass dog, shit like that. But if I’m with someone and I’m not getting any, I'm out. How about you? You ain’t ever speak, but today you’re in the mood.”

“I’ve thought about people being with each other. Maybe me with someone else, but I don’t really think I feel the need to kiss a girl or anything like that.” 

“...I ain’t ever hear no guy say that. But I guess different strokes for different folks.”

And then Sreeyan smiled. Let his head fall back in the direction of his opened marble-patterned composition notebook. Let his wide blue eyes scan bright cursive words covering entirely the space on those white pages. Let his small brown hands grip a red-colored pen that bled blue ink. Let the clock pitter-patter and the bell scream. 

Sreeyan hadn’t done anything special during that conversation with José. He just was. And he was open and innocent and foreign to me. I never heard him speak much after that or learned more about him. But in my dreams, he was alive. And perhaps he wasn’t really him. And I couldn’t say why I fell in love with Sreeyan, but I knew that he in my head made me comfortable. 

I talked about asses and titties with José and our friends, and what Out of 10 I would rate the shy Korean girl with glasses who sat in the back corner alone in Spanish. But, I couldn’t explain to José that I wanted to kiss a woman and be physically intimate with girls I found attractive, but I thought I’d be as happy in a sexless marriage with a man as I would marrying any woman. I never felt, however, that Sreeyan would have expected me to fabricate a reason for my affections. 

For a period of time, I believed that my attraction to Sreeyan wasn’t love. Because in none of my dreams did we ever do anything resembling José’s definition of love and that was all that I knew romantic love could be. What I wanted to do with Sreeyan was to wrap my arms around his neck and caress the messy hair on the back of his head while he slept. To meander under leafy woods in their meadows or stroll street blocks painted by neon signs, enjoying the security of walking beside him. To eat with him in comfortable silence. José’s love though was still more appealing to me - at that time - than my parent’s partnership. 

My Amma and Appa had an arranged marriage and worked relatively well together to raise children and build a home. They never threw plates or other shit at each other. They only ever screamed at each other when it came to my mother’s hoarding or my father’s traditional South Asian misogyny. Or my father’s family and the crap way they sometimes treated my mom or the crap way my mom sometimes treated them. I don’t know if that’s what love is. At least, for a long time, I never wanted that for myself. Probably, my idea of a healthy relationship contradicts itself. Maybe, spoken conflict is love’s existence, and friction’s absence is love’s extinction.

It wasn’t until José’s mother divorced her son of a bitch husband who basically forced himself on her every night that José and I realized love wasn’t just about sex. That love and sex could be related, but sex was an intentional action and love sounded more like an accidental state, or—if the current nineteen-year-old me may reflect and have the space to ramble—perhaps love was never either, and it is only one of many actors in a portrait, maybe painted on as a house, or a garden, covering a portion of the canvas of intentional intimacy in order to represent some aspect of heteronormative relativeness in a society of heterogeneity. When José finally ended up having sex with someone - a girl named Jessica - when he was a seventeen-year-old himself (and no, she wasn’t a twelve-year-old girl who had already slept with his little brother), we further confirmed that love and sex traveled separately. 

José was, and still is, obsessed with that girl - though he spent hours crying in my arms when we found out that she apparently pegged a football player the Monday after taking José’s virginity. I like to think that at least a quarter of José’s karma from spreading those rumors about his hyper-sexualized figments of imagination gathered like a raindrop and fell on his ass that day.

 Even now, though I am in my second year of college, José and his stories, his parents and theirs, and my parents with ours are still the only experiences I have regarding relationships. I’ve still never been with somebody. 

My friends tell me I recently got out of a “situationship,” but one that lacked physical intimacy - if such a situation exists in the colloquial sense. I feel instead though as if I fell out of a close friendship. She would borrow my clothes, sometimes sleep in my room (not with me, however, lying against her), and we would spend almost every day together. Every weekend for a month or two we would take an Uber in the afternoon to some coffee shop she had picked and spend the day studying there. In the evenings, we’d take turns picking a restaurant that would probably serve Tiramisu - on her insistence in creating a Tiramisu tier list - and one of us would pay, or we would split our bill. 

José and I go out like that from time to time, but somehow doing it with her meant something more. Neither she nor I, however, liked each other romantically, certainly a platonic appreciation and nothing less. I think we used each other…Became emotionally magnetized to one another. Because I was afraid to be alone and perhaps so was she.

Every year it seems that I understand better what love isn’t and I get farther away from what love is. Sreeyan is dead, and here I am wondering what kind of person he was at the edge of that bridge. I wonder if even he knew who Sreeyan was as he fell through the dark, his body buffeted by a rush of wind and his ears filled by the sound of his own heartbeat and cars’ honking as his body came closer and closer to the sea, and then began to be consumed by it until Sreeyan wasn’t him anymore but a body of water.

Before I let time continue, the tv anchors had finished spouting everything they had minutes and seconds for and an ad for toothpaste was halfway through. My day continued as it did or would have notwithstanding any fluctuation of space or a ripple spreading out far and wide in time, and as I lay in bed that night, I swam in my thoughts splashing around with the reality that Sreeyan had died by suicide. 

***

And I knew that I never knew him. And I knew that love was what I felt for him but that love couldn’t be so impersonal.