Stuck Separated together , part 5

She’s awake, though, wide awake, her mind miles away, spinning stories she knows aren’t true, dreams she knows will never come to life. She imagines, with a kind of detached satisfaction, what it would be like to touch someone else. Not him. Never him, but someone else. Maybe the neighbor’s wife, his her golden hair and too-long lashes, always standing by the door, ready to smile, but not really seeing anyone. She imagines it, the way his hand would feel tangled in the hair of someone else’s husband, someone who’s more than a man, someone shaped by her mind and her desires, someone customized to every inch of fantasy she could dream up. She’d be touching him, in a room far away from here, somewhere in a world where the sheets don’t smell like stale promises, where the blanket doesn’t suffocate.