Standing on a square platform,
surrounded on three sides by still water.
I enter sleep through an antechamber,
and a single shaft of golden light
illuminates a bridge of brown marble.
I am alone but I am not alone;
across that gulf I always see another.
Another platform where the bridge ends,
another soul in sleep's shared lobby.
I try to hold on to that hollow space,
cross the narrow causeway and ask the Other:
How are you here? Why are you here?
But the thread is frayed.
I step onto the bridge,
and in that act realize:
This is not a space for two.
The platforms are real,
but the bridge is fiction.
A second meager step and the chamber dissolves.
We pass through the communal hypnagogia,
each to our own repose.