Imagination

I hate to go to sleep.
And yet, I want to. I'm eager to see what I will dream, if I will dream.
But I hate trying to fall asleep alone. I hate lying there knowing that if Fate had chosen a different path for me, I could be lying with him. But that's just wishful thinking on my part. Even with a twist C. still couldn't be here. Too far away silly, foolish girl. Almost like J. But that's another story for another time.
My imagination is vivid though. Which hurts me more that it does me good. The pleasure is not enough to dull the hurt in knowing it likely won't ever happen.
I can imagine, though.
I can imagine he's holding me in his arms. I can create that deep, even breathing, the heavy thud of his beloved, bitter heart. I can even picture a smile on his face, a real smile, one of joy - erasing all the cynicism and pessimism and bitterness I see. (Wow, I paint him in charcoal, don't I?)
I can imagine a future, a scene of love. I can picture a walk in the city, in the park, one of us snatching a pad out to write something down. (because guaranteed we'd both be writing even then.)
I can imagine and create all of those things, but I can't imagine him with me, here.
And that pains my heart.
It makes me think of all those stories of love truly lost to the ravages of an uncaring, unthinking society. Love which endured beyond even death.
The story of Marie Antoinette and her Comte Axel de Fersen. How could he heave survived after she was killed? (If the story of their love was true at all.) A book series I read once where a girl goes back in time and falls in love with this guy. But, eventually, she has to go home. Such a great love - separated by centuries. She finds his descendent (him, in actuality - reincarnated)and the love that is possible for her. But I don't remember what happens to him.
I think he goes to Africa, desperate to do something to dull or hide or heal his broken, shattered heart. Died in the Nile. It makes me cry. Everytime I think of it.
Why did she get a happy ending, but not him? Why did he have to live and die without her, without love?
Or even in the book Atonement, by Ian McEwan. I absolutely love that book more than anything. It is heartbreaking, but so very real. How, from the very beginning, their love is thwarted and kept from fruition, all from the mistakes of one little girl's clouded mind. Such a tragic story.
But I'm talking of fictional characters.
Still, these stories of the heart, of the soul, appeal to me like nothing else.
Probably why C. appealed to me so greatly in the beginning.
I just can't help it, I'm a very sentimental creature. Must be the hormones mixed with poetry. Deadly combination. You get a sort of Byronic, lovestruck, Emily Dickinson-like spinster.
Bound for a broken heart and nothing more.