I awake from my dream fully aware. Aware of my room, my situation, my life and my bittersweet memories of love and loss. Have I become a cliche? The martyr, the loser, the hero, the lonely guy, the what? I share my bed in this small room with three dogs;fully aware of the discomfort I feel at not wanting to move to disturb them as the dream rushes into my waking mind. I fear that any moment any discomfort on their part will leave me here alone.

I am not a dog person. They smell, they seem undignified and incontinent and after an attack by two german shepherds as a child they terrify me. The larger one a pit bullish type, I don't know what breed, is the most terrifying yet now he lies here with me breathing heavy as he slumbers. He will break down my rickety door to get in my room to see me, or is it the bed?Nevertheless I am not alone in these moments and my discomfort as I refuse to ask them to move over is well worth the sacrifice.

I find myself living here after my last brief period of homelessness as a co-worker out of Christian charity and later economic necessity allowed me to sleep in a room on the floor. A former neighbor offered up this bed and here we are; able to sleep and dream.

I dreamt of my first wife, or was it the second? They were so different and I was so different during each marriage that it amazes me how they become one in my dreams. We are on a bus to one of my favorite places on earth Syria, Virginia where I spent the summer Elvis died building a lodge out of logs with other youth at a Christian retreat center.

I felt renewal and rejection in the space of one dream and now I awake to this life. I can easily dwell on the painful skeletons in my closet but choose to find those few drops of sweet marrow; those moments when they loved me when the future was brilliant and my life was just beginning. What a feeling to be loved!

My writing rambles like my mind but my thoughts are orderly and precise. Like a loss-train they line up and account for all that I earned all that I was and all that I will never be again. I am not fatalistic but realistic that at my age and condition and in my despair life may be blessedly cut short; or extended. It is unknowable which will be the greater torture. Yet I continue to live and suffer and laugh and drink and fall in love with beauty.

I write and know I am alive. Love and memories and feelings are illusory. Words are real. I can see them. I can visit them as often as I like. I can save them for eternity, the good and the bad prose are always here for me. They have saved me and for that I am grateful.