I haven’t slept well tonight. I was tossing and dreaming of Jenny. Except I wasn’t dreaming as much as I was trying to access her. Blair, my spirituality teacher, says that dreaming is just another way of being in the world. He says, we have to get better at dreaming, if we want to get better at living in a conscious way. In my dreams, I was coming up to Jenny and hugging her and telling her how much I love her. In my dreams, she seemed beaming, the way I always saw her in life. she seemed happy.

In my dreams, my brain was flooded with words, the way it is always flooded with words. Endless words, enough to fill every crack in the universe, except that the cracks keep getting bigger.

In the early hour of the morning, in that state between frantic dreaming and awakening, I realized with clarity why I was hurting so much. Losing kin hurts. Kin are people who are neither your family, nor your friends, although I guess they could be both. They simply make sense. Their way of being, of moving through the world, of fighting, thinking, loving, makes sense. And because they move through the world in this way, the world also makes sense. Until they are gone and you have to get used to live in a place that is colder and emptier.

When I got up and looked at my puffy face – what a sight! – I had the same clarity. Thinking about Jenny, there is one thing that I do not regret. I have never failed to validate her. In every conversation, in every email, I always said how much I admired her, how incredible she was. When we first met, I had told her how I saw her ten years ago and how all this time I dreamed to meet her. I never held anything back. What a lesson. To know that one thing you will never regret is telling someone how you feel about them.