---
type: chapter
---

I will not deny my excitement for this upcoming visit.

Neither, apparently, will my subconscious, for I have had not one but two dreams since our agreeing to visit, and given that it has only been three nights since then, this makes it a majority of my time spent thinking about her.

The first dream was much like the one I wrote about a few weeks back. I was at her senior recital, it was unspeakably beautiful, and then when I tried to help her up onto the stage, I was pushed away by the crowd, unable to call out to her.

In fact, it was so similar to the first dream that I nearly did not write about it here, but the very act of sitting down at the desk to write seems to have dredged up all of the subtle differences.

Yes, the music was breathtaking, but in an almost hypnotic way. The audience wasn't simply listening to it, we were enchanted.

Yes, the applause was uproarious, but it was outsized, for though the audience was perhaps a few dozen people in that intimate auditorium, the sound of the applause was of hundreds, thousands of people.

And yes, the applause was well earned, but more than that, it sounded possessive, as though at the culmination of the concert, the audience wanted nothing more than to claim Kay for their own.

And finally, yes, I did move to help her up onto the stage, but the act was one of desperation, as though that was not simply to help her take a bow, but to rescue her from the grabbing hands that wished to take her.

I didn't just fall away out of weakness, I was actively pushed away, I was an impediment on the audience's way to claiming what was rightfully theirs.

As with any such dream, this all felt astoundingly normal. It was not a nightmare, at the time. It was just a dream in which all of those things --- the enchanting music, the audience, the possessiveness --- were simply an inherent part of the universe. They were a core truth. They couldn't *not* have been present.

And yet, two days on, the anxiety of having Kay taken away from me (such as it were) clings to me like scent-block. I can feel it as an oily residue in my fur, between my pads.

The other dream is...I don't know. I have only been up a few minutes, now, and I am still struggling to internalize it. The part of me that is able to interpret is not yet functioning, though I have my coffee already, but the part of me that desires interpretation has been online since I crawled out of bed. I do not know *what* the dream was, certainly not what it means, but I suppose the least I can do is write it down.

I dreamed that, during the visit, we were sitting down on a couch to watch a movie and that Kay surprised me with a kiss. The dream jumps from there to us in her bed, trying to...it is hazy. We were trying to make love, and it's not that anything was wrong or necessarily preventing us, not in the dream's universe, but my point of view kept rewinding back to the point where we had just lay down together. After a few of these "rewinds", I found myself --- not the me who was laying down, but the me who was dreaming, or perhaps observing the dream --- getting frustrated with the repetition, and I started to change up my approach. What if I put my paw *there* this time, instead? What if I kissed first instead of touching? What if I lay on my back? What if I lay her on hers?

It was one of those fruitless dreams of struggling to find the *correct* way to engage with an idea. It was an erotic dream, but without the catharsis of orgasm.

I don't know. I am just as sure that my feelings for Kay go far, far beyond sex as I am sure that I would not turn down sex, should the topic ever come up.

If I'm honest with myself, given my current struggles over even telling her that I have these feelings for her, I think the idea that I actively pursue sex at any point soon is not just inadvisable but outside the realm of possibility.

I just don't yet know what it means.
