I Dream About Him

He’s a country boy, and I’m a city girl.  We met in college.  He would sit by me in business class and listen to me challenge the professor.  I don’t know what I was doing in business school.  When the topics were profit margins, overseas manufacturing, and maximizing stockholder wealth, all I wanted to talk about was environmental practices, sweat shops, and genetically-modified food.  I went through 5 years of that.  He loved it though.  He got me.  At first I thought he just wanted my proofreading skills (calling his spelling and grammar poor would be an understatement), but then we started revealing ourselves.  I could not wait to see him in class.  I would get goosebumps when he leaned over to share a secret or tease me.  The way he threw back his head when he laughed, and flashed his smile, he made me want to sell all my worldly possessions and learn how to jar preserves.  I would read his term papers and make fun of him.  He never minded.  His favorite part was when I would ask him about women and sex.  Nothing was ever too personal.  He was an open book.  There was something unexplainable about our connection. 

We were from different corners of the earth.  However, we both had this aching desire to experience life and not conform, both stuck between selling our souls for money and success and searching for a higher plane of happiness.  I would prod him, test him, question his faith (his family is Mormon), make him search himself.  No one had ever done that for him.  He would call me beautiful and worthy, he admired my intelligence, such a rarity.  Every man desires a smart woman, as long as it doesn’t tread on their ego.  I’ve never tread lightly on anything.  I morph from self-effacing to a bold assertiveness, it’s really quite a spectacle.  My recreational drug use and casual sex only served to fascinate him.  Imagine that, I could be myself with all the lunacy and seediness that make that possible, and he lost no love.  What he liked most was how I couldn’t watch my manners.  If he was moody, I called him an asshole.  If he talked about hunting or politics or religion, I would give him a puzzled look as if he’d just pissed all over my Edwardian rug.  I always shot him straight.  It tickled him.  Imagine that, not having to bat my eyelashes, feign interest, or spoon-feed his narcissism.  Um, jack-fucking-pot. 

I did not see him too much after college.  We keep in touch still.  I call him after breakups, and bouts of my kamikaze syndrome.  When the world doesn’t make sense anymore, and I’m feeling like I’ve done my best, and nothing gives, I dream about him.  I dream of us running away to old Mexico and searching for Aztec gold.  A dusty road, a bottle of cheap tequila, couple of gold pans and his shining blue eyes.

Someday maybe.