Dear [name redacted],

In the past 17 days, I have dreamt about you 13 times. It’s getting ridiculous and, quite frankly, I’m considering going to see a doctor. Or a hypnotist. Or a psychic, who could maybe tell me if all of this is wasted effort. But psychics only tell you what you already know.

The worst dreams are the ones that look real. It is the cruelest form of hope because, for a few moments, I get to have something real, something there. When I wake up, I am still 900 miles away from you, and you still don’t know how much I love you. I had a dream in which we went couch shopping. In another, you cooked me spaghetti. Another as I was dozing in the shower: I made banana pancakes and you gave me a Picasso painting.

The dreams that bring me back to reality are the dreams farthest from reality. They remind me I don’t actually have you. The dream where we ate clouds. The dream where New York was falling into a sinkhole and we tried to hijack a submarine, because neither of us knew how to fly a plane. The dream where you were Italian, and I was losing my eyesight so I just kept staring at you.

Because I am so far away from you, sometimes I really do think you’re only a dream, a figment I created to give me a tragedy to write poems about. But then you send me a picture, or a snapchat video, and I am reminded once again that you are flesh and blood and fingers I desperately want to hold.

I tell myself I am OK with unrequited. Unrequited means I can be close to you, can talk to you, can walk down the hallways with you. We will never hold hands. We will never have a taco buffet on the coffee table in front of The Shawshank Redemption. But you can recommend a book to me. You can hug me. You can remember me.

But I don’t want to be remembered. I want never to be forgotten.

I love you, and I am OK with you not loving me back. I’ve accepted it. I’ve made my peace with it.

But I will not remember you, because I will never forget you. Your eyes will be the first thing I see against the night skies on the backs of my eyelids when I wake up in the morning, because they star in almost all of my dreams.

I will open my eyes, and you will not be there, but I will still be in love with you.

Love, when you need it,

M.

—By Meghan B., 18, New York City