lucyoncolorado

(more jetlag dreaming)

In which I show off in front of people I knew as a teenager, then turn into a child...

I'm in my childhood home once again. The dining room is a giant swimming pool. The only light in the room comes up through the water, a greenish glowing light that casts wave patterns on the dark walls. The room echoes with a bubbling sound, as if we are listening to an aquarium filter.

S is sitting at one edge of the pool, leading a meeting about something very important. A couple dozen people are sitting on underwater benches as if they were all in a hot tub. They have clip boards and are taking notes. S is making a presentation. I should be in attendance. I feel guilty for arriving late. There are a few other stragglers and she calls us over without naming any of us individually. I know she's done this so that I'm not singled out. I walk around the perimeter of the pool, but I don't see a place for me to sit. I will have to join someone else. I look at the people gathered, hoping to find someone who will let me sit with them. I don't know or trust any of the gathered people very well; I have not seen most of them since I was a child. S has stayed in touch with more people from our home town than I have.

After walking most of the way around the pool, I finally settle on DWG. The alternative is to draw attention to myself by acknowledging that there is no place for me to sit and causing a scene by making others move. Even though S is a very close friend and the meeting is important to her, I feel like I can't do this, so I take my chances that DWG will accept me. I haven't seen him since we were teenagers, but he's still looking hip and attractive. Most of the other men present have a frumpy middle-aged look about them. I dive into the pool, swim over to DWG and slide up to rest in his lap. I lean back so that my head is against his chest and my arms are draped across his legs. From the outside, I look casual and confident, as if DWG and I have an existing relationship. Internally I'm hoping he won't reject me. I'd be humiliated.

He plays along. He accepts me as casually as I approach him. He puts his hand on my chin and turns my face up to kiss him. It's electrifying. I'm happy that we still have so much chemistry decades later. I know that the public display is inappropriate, but I'm also enjoying the attention. Of course the mature part of my personality knows that no one cares what we've been up to since high school and that making out in a meeting is annoying and selfish, but the sneering and self-absorbed side is satisfied to show off. We are beautiful. Our lives are interesting. High school was worse for us than the rest of them, but we've made it well into adulthood without their dullness. And now we're alive with sexual electricity.

Everyone else disappears and the dream just becomes a typical sex dream except we're in the water so my body feels light in his lap. I'm facing him now and his hands are on my hips. But when I look down at his penis, I see that there are feathers sticking up, like a comb, on the head. He notices that I'm surprised. He says, "that's why it's called a cock".

Now we are on a school bus. We are younger. DWG pulls up his pants and I sit next to him on a bus seat. I look out the window at a cow pasture and see a bull mount a heifer. I look back at DWG, but now he is JAB. This makes sense because we are children. I look down at my shoes with delight- they dangle above the bus floor. JAB tells me that I've missed my stop.

I grab my backpack and walk towards the front of the bus. The driver is Ms. L, as obese and brash as ever. She's smoking a cigarette and thumping her hands on the steering wheel to Don't Mess With My TuTu, blaring with static from the portable radio sitting on the dash. I tell her that she's passed my house without letting me out. She responds that it's my own fault. If I hadn't been sucking on a boy's face, I would've noticed.

She stops the bus right there in the cow pasture and tells me to get out. It's only a mile or so home, and I know the way. I climb over the barbed wire, but my skirt gets hung and tears. I slosh through the muddy field with a torn skirt, kicking the crawdaddy mounds along the way.