I dream whenever I fall asleep. Josh dreams once a week. And Shawn dreams so hard he can't tell whether he's awake or not. Sometimes he'll look confused and ask Josh and me if this is real. "This" being the world around him.
When we're all together, I ask myself the same question. "Is this real?" In January, we hit a year. Josh and I have already been together almost 13 years, and Shawn has never been serious with anyone the way he's serious with us. At first, he worried we'd wake up and leave him. That it might be too much for us. Those fears still have echoes. Sometimes he'll be short with me out of nowhere and finally admit it's because I cheated on him in a dream. The other night at two in the morning, he called me in his sleep to ask if the pies had been delivered. He continued to ask until I said, "Yes, the pies are here."
"All right," he said. "Goodnight."
Of course, there were no pies. There are only ever pies if I make them, and in Shawn's dream, I'd made the pies but had forgotten to bring them to an important pie contest. In other words, his dream was real enough for him to believe he was awake.
I don't know what I'd do if I couldn't depend on accurately reading reality. It's the only thing keeping me hopeful in a violently ignorant time, and I imagine it's why Shawn, Josh, and I spend at least an hour catching each other up on world events every night.
Even in a two-person relationship, there's worry over maintaining the thread. There can be stress in that maintenance. Some spiders eat their web each day and rebuild it overnight to keep it strong. We try to examine our pieces and put them back together often. There's a reason I've been playing with LEGOs again for the first time since I was a kid. There's a reason Josh has been eating sugar cereal and watching old cartoons on weekend mornings. There's a reason Shawn reintroduced himself to his orisha, Ochun, a couple weeks ago in a Santeria ritual by the river, a ritual that required him to smoke an old cigar that made him ill for three days. The future can be guessed at but can't be seen straight on. For all the talk of facing what's coming, we need to look back to acknowledge what's already changed. And what hasn't. We can do the long work of trying to better the world and at the same time embrace old comforts where we find them, where they'll have us.
Right now, we have each other. I wrote this relationship over and over in short stories before we even met Shawn. My friend, Roxane, has asked, "Why three people?" and I never have a good answer. Maybe I don't know yet. Maybe I just know it works.
Soon, we'll all be living in the same place together. Josh and I are getting rid of unnecessary junk, and Shawn has acclimated more and more to sleeping in our house. Last week he was taking a nap on the couch while Josh and I worked on projects in other rooms. We heard the front door open. Shawn had walked barefoot out onto the porch in his sleep. He stopped and stared into the dark, staying on the porch with us beside him, a warm spot on a cold night. Stronger together, and even in his sleep not asking the question he's asked so many times before, only knowing the truth of it somewhere beyond whatever dream made him leave our house in the first place. We would find him.
This is real.