The Dream

This morning I woke from a beautiful dream.

She stood there before me, exactly as I remembered her: smart, beautiful, aggressive, and playful. There was no background, just darkness, but we were lit by a warm, orange light. She smiled, that old half-cocked grin, as we held eachother as if pausing in a dance. It was the most intensely real experience I’ve ever had.

She asked me to give her a child.

We came together and made love. It was abstract and timeless, our bodies flowing together under the curve of the Goldent Ratio. A subdued passion. I could feel her body as my own, and I knew when the new life quickened within her.

Eventually we parted. Our fingers interlacing and releasing, as the currents of our lives took hold, pulling us along our separate paths. I couldn’t have said where either of us was going, but as her eyes dissolved into the shadows their light never dimmed. Our souls had been woven together. We’d forged a link that neither distance nor time could ever rust away. We’d be together again.

Then I awoke. I lay there for a long time. Finally, maybe an hour or so after opening my eyes, I admitted that it had just been a dream.

It’s been three years since I last saw her. I’ll probably never see her again, and even if I do I know that she won’t be the girl that haunts my dreams. Her body will be worn and wrinkled from the years we spent apart, her spirit whill have grown cynical and jaded from trials I will never know.

I know the exact moment when my love for her crytallized into its permanent form, neurons alligning into an irrevocable pattern. I remember it with perfect clarity despite all the drinks that night, bombing along old country roads in a car which periodically stalled itself for no good reason. She’d just run up and tackled me, we rolled across the lawn, wrestling and exchanging half-hearted punches. This is it, I thought, this is the point of no return. We kissed. “I love you,” I said.

Her breathing came in happy pants, her face and chest flush with arrousal, pushing her infinitessimally towards that precipice, reaching towards that asymptope, so close, so close…

She looked me in the eyes and spoke. “I know.”

A few months afterwards we stopped talking.

Three years later. There have been other women since then, relationships even, and two dead babies. For the most part she’s just a memory, some photographs from a different time and place… and then she appears when I’m least expecting it.

Life goes on, I guess.

I celebrated my 29^th birthday recently. I can feel myself getting old. The angst from my youth hasn’t dissapeared the way it was supposed to, it’s just settled into a dull background-roar. Hangovers are worse with each passing year, despite the fact that in the best shape of my life. I’ve been praised and scorned by the System, raised up and beat down. I’ve grown accustomed to myself.

The world’s changed, however, and nobody seems to notice.

At the age of 17 my father kicked me out of his home, so I found a full-time job in the fast-food industry. Nowadays, every coffee shop I go to is staffed by older women working part-time, so that the corporation doesn’t have to pay benefits. Back then food was cheap, cigarettes were $3.50 a pack, and you could smoke in bars. Nowadays the suburbanites have rewritten the rules.

Of course the System was rotten back then, too; but the rot’s worsened. War Criminals for Presidents, two wars and a collapsing economy, mass profiling through facebook and google, the Corporatization of ethics…

…and I’m worried that I’ve forgotten how to give a fuck. Everyone else seems to be fiddling while Rome burns, and yet they still show up on time for their soul-crushing jobs.

The coffee’s done brewing, so I go out on the balcony. It’s a rather shameful time to be waking up, but that doesn’t really matter to me. Down at the corner, some youths are singing an ugly rendition of a rap song I know. It’s about the rapper’s contempt for his fans and hangers-on, now that he’s famous. I wonder if any of them have homes

Things aren’t going to get better any time soon. They’re probably going to get worse. I do what I can, but I don’t know how much it matters.

That girl’s still deep in my mind, waiting to appear.

I’m never going to see her again.

Thanks to Gonzalo Lira, for driving me to write this post by writing his own emo bullshit.  Truly a great economic mind – I recommend him.