I have always had an overactive imagination. I have fantasized ridiculous events since I was a child—glamorous weddings with famous people, or daydreamed impossible situations only a few people have. My inner world could be so delusional, I could get wrapped up in my alternate reality where I was rich and famous and successful and in love with a beautiful rich famous person. Basically, I was Puff Daddy.
But now I find my fantasies take on a different scope. I lay awake at night and imagine that I can time travel, that I can communicate with those in my life in another dimension. I can travel to the weeks before Skyler dies and tell him not to get the motorcycle, I send messages to myself like character trapped in a virtual reality video game on Black Mirror did to herself. Don't go on the trip, I tell myself. Invite him over for dinner. Show up at his work so he can't ride.
In my new otherworldly fantasy, he can't get on the bike because he doesn't have it with him that day because I've thwarted it from the beyond. In my fantasy, I've somehow told his friend who loaned him the money to buy it that he will die if she does it.
In other fantasies, I dream about DJing and playing him music he'd never heard before and being happy that he's proud of me and loving the experience. That's a fantasy that would have been possible in my recent past life, the one where my boyfriend didn't die in a motorcycle accident.
It is no longer possible and it now as fantastical as the fantasy that I go on a date with Alexander Skarsgard and we fall madly in love despite the fact I'm a short, middle-aged Italian woman with body fat and no discernible talent except typing on my computer.
In my new now-impossible fantasy life, he is with me in Los Angeles and we are dog-sitting Daisy the tiny blonde Chihuahua I had shown him on video chat the previous year when he was still alive. I dream of showing him Los Angeles, a weird place he would probably hate but that he might be entertained by. I imagine us going to the Frieze Art Fair and him hating it completely and making fun of the art but also still enjoying the Hollywood backlot where movies are made and thinking that was neat. He'd use that word, “neat.”
He is always in my head, always floating around my consciousness, his voice, his judgments. I know this is what people mean in a way that people are still here, they don't really die.
But I reject this bullshit, this Buddhist notion that we are everything and everything is everywhere or that we are in a multiverse where the soul has taken another shape (a butterfly! a star! ) I reject this bullshit because it is a fantasy, as dumb as the one that I can time travel to warn our past selves to never go on the ride or buy the motorcycle. The afterlife and all the permutations of it are a chickenshit avoidance of death and its finality. It is an avoidance of the truth which is that we are here now and that is all there is and to do what you can while you are here.
In one of my fantasies I have, while am laying in bed and can't sleep in Nashville where I traveled to be away from Seattle during the winter, I dream that this multiverse exists and that he can get in touch with me from this beyond, that he is watching over me as the psychics say. I dream that he can text me, that his name will appear on my screen one more time. That he can tell me he loves me.
Anything. I'll take it.
I text him. His phone has long been dead as he is.
I keep having dreams of you
Dreams of love and dating and then I wake up and you aren't there. Thank you for loving me
The next day I’m driving to a trail to go hiking. I'm barely able to focus on the road and everything seems to take extraordinary effort in terms of concentration. I am lost and have gone the wrong way when I hear his notification alert sound, and I see his name flash on my screen.
Skyler
The bubbles are green instead of iMessage iPhone blue and it is startling.
Who is this
I don't know who you are
So STOP TEXTING ME
Stop texting me
Cold hard reality.
So much for the fantasy of contact from the beyond.
If the phone had been active for a while, the person has been getting messages about his death, photos of his gravesite, messages from me for months. And I think how cruel they must be.
I hate you
You suck
Asshole
I write them back to tell them my boyfriend died in a motorcycle accident and they could be kinder considering they've seen these messages.
It is a 12-year-old. And he apologizes. He is crying. His uncle died. He is so sorry. He wants to know if we were engaged. How long we were together. He is upset and I feel bad. He wants to know his name. He lives in a town where Skyler lived because Skyler's number is from when he lived in Colorado. He wants to know if he knows him or his mom might. But he doesn't. He is 12 and he is crying and he calls me and he's so sorry and I tell him it is ok.
I can't text Skyler anymore. I can't have the fantasy of seeing his name on my screen and hearing his notification sound. Because it happened. In reality, it was a 12-year-old boy. He was so sorry.
My fantasy world is no longer one where I am rich and famous and married to Alexander Skarsgard. Instead, it is simply the life I used to have, where my boyfriend didn't die in a motorcycle accident.