farewell to all that

So I had this dream, when there was a foreign element in my bed who snores a little but doesn't smoke. I was in the office and bunnies were pouring under the door, and I was frantically bunny wrangling. I caught them up in a lip of a lid of a box and went to deposit them outside... but instead of Marin it was some ramshackle seen-better-days colonial pink building in the Bahamas that smelled of disinfectant, and I've got an armful of bunnies. I was reluctant to free them in the garden (see plague of locusts and wallace & gromit - whee!) but along comes a herd of giraffe walking single file to the sea, and lo the bunnies follow. And I say to my colleague, well, it's perfectly logical that the bunnies should follow the giraffe. This is what happens when you let engineers spend the night, dreams get tweaky and it gets hard to breathe when you can't help but match your breath to his noisy slumber.

It takes awhile to sleep well when another body is taking up half the expanse of mattress and coveting half your sheets. A body gets proprietary, a body might jealously sprawl, even though I have it on good authority that this body is partial to the right side of the bed and on ordinary nights never strays past the middle. But that body, the one sharing, the one three quarters satiated and one quarter undone has gravitated to the middle of the mattress and is pinging the nearest mammal with her fierce sonar, and because bodies have their own mysterious code he's pinging me back, I can feel it prickle across my skin, intrude on my sleep, bringing me bunnies and giraffe and the pink of the bahamas, and all this time we are only sleeping.

Two days later when the blush is fading from the rose, and I can't quite recall the timbre of his voice and what was whispered, and I can't even really summon the details of his face and the litany begins, innocuous, insistent, perfidious, devastating. Can't remember, can't recall, but for the scantest trace of his voice in the earliest morning, the solid evidence of a credit card receipt and the dirty dishes in the sink, my ravaged face. Two days later and the barriers go back up, not for lack of emails, strictly for lack of imagination, or strictly caused by an avid imagination. Those flimsy cotton candy levees, breached by a well placed warm hand go down as easily as warmed maple syrup.

Two days later when it's just me and the bear in the bed, fresh out of the bath. Two days later when I sort of accidentally on purpose get drunk the night before and deliberately smoked an almost pack of cigarettes and wept in the bath tub because I needed to. Not because it's complicated, and not because it's fraught, not because I don't think he's fantastic, mostly because I am terrified in three parts. I am bravado, I am malleable, I am all insecurity, masked in political proclamations and a sophistacted vocabulary. I am very, very strong and I am very, very weak. I'd fancy myself a lesson in contradictions except that I am not.

It's just that two days later (hormones optional) after having a four star dinner with four Israelis and telling dirty jokes and arguing politics in the same breath, and all of that sleep and the dreams that I missed, and coming home to the super heater that is threading tentacles down the hallway to the tub, and my computer and dial up connection, and the stack of bills that remain to be paid, the glasses in the sink and my long, long neglected dry cleaning, how could a girl let herself fall with all of monotonies begging for attention, when I don't trust myself to be able to pick him out of a line up, yes, yes he's the one, he nabbed my heart when I was looking away, he's got my blood on his palms and I am guilty of complicity....