Last night I had a curious dream in which I was falling in love, but the object of my desire never entered the narrative directly. Dreaming, as it were, about a woman who wasn't there. (Yes, for all my cultural broad-mindedness and acceptance, I'm utterly heteronormative in my romantic life.) Instead the dream was consumed with difficult errands being pursued with the help of mikigal and danjite, and a bunch of natter about basketball, which is weird because my competence at basketball is roughly on a par with my competence at neurosurgery. On the other hand, it was nice to see my friends, even if only their nighttime simulacra as generated by my chemo-addled brain.

It was a curious feeling, being in dream-love with someone who wasn't present, even as a name or a face. Liberating and strange. I am reminded of a literary technique I much admire, which is the telling of the story that isn't there. Gene Wolfe illustrates this fantastically in The Fifth Head of Cerberus, wherein he presents three linked novellas, the gaps and shadows of which tell a fourth, distinct story that is never put to page. It's rather as if I wrote about the contents of your closet, a day at your workplace and the tale of your parents meeting and starting a family without ever mentioning your name or talking about you directly. There would be a you-shaped hole in the narrative that a perspicacious reader could populate by inference.

That's me, in love with an inference. Metaphor or reality or just chemo fog? I'll never know.