In my dream, she was in the back room at the reunion. This girl I barely knew and only partially remember.
She lay on the bed, her clothes scattered about while we took turns with her. Her eyes were closed, her legs open, and as I watched someone fuck her from the doorway, I felt my heart leap into my throat.
I didn’t love her.
I’m not entirely sure if I had a crush on her either. But there she was, returned from the past to remind me that I certainly felt lusty affection for this ephemeral girl, and I never admitted it.
But there is something about nostalgic desire that feels powerful.
Teenage hormones mix in with the excitement of discovery, and when I close my eyes, I can remember what it felt like to want someone that badly.
That desperately.
So mind-numbingly blinding that all I could do was lust with my entire being minus the parts that think.
And if tomorrow, I walked into that room full of old faces, and someone winked and nodded towards the back room, and if tomorrow, I followed their lead and entered that back room, and if tomorrow, I saw her, lying on the bed ready and willing, I imagine that I might fuck her and cry at the same time.
I’d fuck her because there is no other choice, and I’d cry because those long-lost days would return in a fever dream that had no expression other than tears.
Nostalgia is for suckers, they say. It’s a way to forget the present, lose oneself in an imagined past, and barely pretend to live.
But last night, in a dream, I saw her face and her twisted smile full of a passion I wonder if she ever felt; and she was beautiful. I ached for her in a way I never did, and the world was safe, and I was alive. And as I crawled over her, looking down into her blessed eyes, she reached up one hand and touched my face.
In my dream, we fuck, and everything comes back in an instant: her plaid field hockey skirt, my purple converse, her notebook scribbled with poetry, my long hair and John Lenon glasses, her short legs and muscular thighs, and my pony knees shaking as I stared at her in class wondering what she’d taste like.
And for a short while, I can let the last two years drop away. I can forget the death and the grief, the fear, and the depression, and I can live in a single moment with someone who doesn’t exist.
In my memory, she can be perfect, and so can I. And in my dream, I can pretend for at least a little while that she might have wanted me too.
And all of it asks for nothing in return.