You know how it is like when you live through a certain stage of your life or pass a certain age, you don’t experience certain things in life anymore. Like the frustration of finding love, the thrill of falling in love, the insecurity of being in love, the worry of falling out of love, and the heartache and the path of self-destruction in the name of love. Thereafter, the road to recovery, trying so very hard not to think of the one, hardly any effort to forget someone until it has turned into a story of melancholy. You begin to forget the face, the scent, the touch, even the tone of the voice. It is as though all that you have gone through is relegated into nothingness.
So what’s the point?
I guess, it is the love experience and the journey that counts.
So for someone like me who has lived through a certain stage of my life, passed a certain age, I don’t get to experience the game of love anymore.
Except of course, when in a dream.
I had a dream last night. A vivid one. One that I can remember most of the story and especially from beginning to end.
There was this girl. Petit and fair. Not the pretty type. Certainly charming with her eccentric attitude. My dream character (a.k.a me) and she had become close. Since she was popular, she had many admirers. Now, I was rather casual as I did not think I had a shot. She has this aura that made me felt that she was into me. For all I knew, she could have this aura turned on for all the guys around her. Or to the least, the guys she wanted to attract.
We hang out. In parties. And in a casual setting. Most of the time, we were not alone. There were others. But she or rather we often found ways to have moments of light intimacy. Like the brushing of our hands. The occasional locking of eyes. That exchange of a secret smile. At one stage, I vividly remembered that I was in love. I looked forward to seeing her. I felt happy when we were together. Down when we were not.
Somewhere somehow like how most love stories unfold, the relationship had gone down south. Perhaps she was tired of me. Perhaps she was toying with my feeling. I had no idea. It was the classic case of a crash and burn. The sadness was overwhelming. The heartache was so intense that I must have woken up in the middle of the night.
Because there was a cut scene to the time I was supposed to have healed. Years later it must have been. There was this very old car that I drove. The same car that we were used to having when the girl and I were together. In my dream, I have revisited the places we have been to. I must have tried to regain some of the lost memories. No one wants to lose the entire journey experience just because of a bad heartbreak.
It was a school. Perhaps. And I met the new students there. A canteen. A large roundabout at the lobby. It was at night. I observed the sky with the new students. Such peace. The open sky. I could not help but wonder, where was the girl and how had she been? She had faded in my mind, a great deal.
The night was late and I was lying comfortably on a mat with three other students. Two guys and two girls. And we were chatting casually. The girls were in skimpy dresses. All of a sudden, one of the girls had started to … and I gasped …
I guess that was the time when things got erotic in my dream. In real life though, my wife has woken me up asking me what’s for breakfast.
My wife has impeccable timing.