Ghosts.

This morning, awake and lucid earlier than usual, I was thinking about my bed being empty. This is not something I usually think about, so I allowed my mind to go there. I mean, I noticed that, when the bed is made, I sleep on one side of the bed. And the left side of the bed looked fairly untouched, while the right side of the bed was all rumpled.

I thought about my insomnia, which kept me from working yesterday. And thinking about insomnia, for some reason, leads me to think about Dax, who suffered from perpetual insomnia as a side-effect of his lupus, I think.

So then, it's the middle of the morning, my bedroom is dark, and I'm thinking about Dax, who wanders into my thoughts to my annoyance on occasion. This morning, I visualized Dax in my bedroom. I imagined him sleeping there.

Dax was the one who walked off the weight, became a vegan and also became completely buff. He was the one who got upset in 2001 because I criticized an essay he wrote - so he ended our already fragile friendship. Apparently, I was smothering him, destroying him and doing all sorts of terrible things to him, but the straw that broke the camel's back was that I took him off a pedestal and criticized him once. That's when he ended the friendship, not when I flattered him but when I decided not to. He was the touchy vegan who accused me of hedonism because I told him I liked junk food. He was the one with the birds, the one who lost his job and was surprised when it wasn't easy to find another one. He's the one who went to grad school in anthropology, even though he wanted to study mythology to better improve the comic books he was writing. He was the one who cared about me genuinely - until he didn't.

Ours was never a romantic relationship, though I wanted one with him. But this morning, he was as I remembered him - except he was in my bedroom.

When I think about Dax, I have to retrace everything about why we stopped speaking, which is painful but it gets him out of my head or out of my bedroom or out of the bookstore or wherever I'm picturing him. He just stands there in my mind until I remind myself that it's not solely my fault that he's no longer my friend. In fact, I always remind myself that I am the stronger one of the two of us. Or at least, some parts of me are stronger. Our friendship didn't work. It's simply that.

But now he's a ghost in my head. He mostly appears in the bookstore, on the aisle where I saw him last or in the cafe by the windows. He's never been in my bedroom before.

If I picture Welsh Guy in my head, he's usually sitting and eating dinner with me in Rocky's Pizzeria in Athens, smiling and eager to get me home. If I picture PG, I'm yelling at him over coffee at the Espresso Royale on Broad Street, and he's smirking at me. When I see Jerry, he's in his dorm room, crying about the fires, and I'm crying with him, telling him that he shouldn't blame himself for what's happened - that he should blame the person who set the fires. I usually see Robbie and Matt together when I see them in my head, and we're walking back to the dormitories along Lumpkin Street. Robbie's wearing his glasses and a brown leather jacket. Matt's just lagging around, asking me how he can get Robbie's attention.

Robbie's dead now. Matt thinks me crazy and exists at Berkeley. PG and I last had an uneventful, unentertaining dinner in 1999, and I called Lupo immediately after it and told him that I didn't know what I was doing there. Jerry, if he's alive, is here in Atlanta somewhere. I see mutual friends of ours, but I don't really ask about him. Welsh Guy, I believe, thinks me crazy, too, and he's in Manchester, where he probably wastes no time thinking about me.

Dax is around. I see his friend Addie, and she's nice to me. I intentionally don't ask about him when I see her, and she offers me no information. She just gets happy for me when I have news about a move or a raise - my own progress in my life, progress that she's surprised that I've made because I'm still at the same bookstore. The last time I saw Dax, I wasn't as brave or unemotional as I would've liked. I was upset, vulnerable, clingy. He wasn't unkind, but he wasn't comfortable.

Half of me wanted him. Half of me wanted to never see him again. Time had passed. Our friendship had failed, and we were better for it. There was no going back.

But I loved him once. And he loved me, he did. And he stays in my head as that guy from that summer, that friend who was supposed to last for longer than a couple months, but he didn't.

Now that I think about it, I actually met Dax on a Valentine's Day in 1998 - at the same play where I met Larry. I met him again on a Valentine's Day in 2001, when he was browsing in my store when a customer pulled a knife "to show me." That day, Dax walked me around so that I wouldn't be by myself.

I thought about writing him, just to see if he's OK. But I don't really want to do that.

It's difficult having him and the others in my head, but it's better if they just stay there.