Dare

Again coming into work too late despite the fact that I am already up for a few, thanks to p.’s alarm (he promised he’d call and wake me but he is tied up with his work or forgot, yet the complainative bitch inside me murmurs in satisfaction, I told you so), but I can’t leave before I write about last night and the dream I had this morning.

First, the dream, because dreams have a tendency to slip away, and it’s been a while already. I was living(?) with P. (who last night said something nonchalantly about living together, how it’ll just happen if we continue to sleep 6 night out of 7 together), and we got a parcel that was actually an American football on which Post-its were glued, which was actually addressed to my last Israeli BF, X. So I left the house in a hurry because I didn’t want P. to receive this parcel, and because I was naked I only put on my terrycloth bathrobe, and across from the house (I was scared the door would slam behind me and I’d be left out) was a gas station, which was standing on a deep crevice in the ground, which looked like foundations dug out for a building. The football slipped from my hands and became stuck in one of the lower rungs of these foundations, so that I couldn’t retrieve it. I mean, it was just close enough to the ground that I could reach it if someone grabbed my ankles and lowered me, but being alone, barefoot and wearing only a bathrobe, I didn’t want to chance it and have either my backside exposed or slip into the abyss. There was also something about a bra, but I don’t remember that part clearly. Then somebody from the Israeli teacher’s board came to interview me with a clipboard, and I don’t remember if in the dream I was a teacher (which I have never been), or they were actually asking about someone else, but what they wanted to know was, they had a list of names and they wanted to know who was born and Israel and who wasn’t, they said it’s important because the school kids complain and they are the customers and they call the shots. And there was a list with names of people who were sure to be “real” Israeli and those who were suspected of being born overseas, and I think they wanted me to validate it, I think it was a survey of some sort and they (it was a she, exactly the type of person I never ever trust, critical, gossipy, nosy, and a voice often heard on various Israeli web forums; but of course, an inner voice of mine) wanted me to confirm or validate or add to the info they had. But I refused. Then there was a video shoot of my breasts, with extreme close up on grainy film like you get when you play home videos on cinematic screens, then P. woke me up to kiss goodbye before he left for work.

I stayed in bed for a while trying to get into the dream. I understood it very deeply, as I do with some of my dreams. I understood that it had to do with last night’s party, which was wonderful, in which I saw respectable “square” people totally being loose and free and happy with themselves, true to themselves, and there was no more dichotomy between the cool cynical kids and the unselfconscious geeks, and everything was a mix, and it was great being an adult, and not caring. I understood that I am losing some very harsh self critical parts of myself, that I developed through years and probably decades of conditioning, and living in a hard society, and taking on the hardest aspects of that society, internalizing them, making them my own, so that I could no longer separate the harshest most critical voices from my own emotions, and we became one. And that last one that I dared to be myself to was X, but that ended very badly, and I only dared out of cod calculation, because I knew he was in love with me and I wasn’t with him, so I felt I had nothing to lose, and things were temporary anyone (although he is the only guy I lived with, and we even talked of marriage and so forth, but it was easy to talk about, because no risk was involved; it terrifies me the kind of post-orgasmic bliss I felt when P. said he might live with me, while he was being so casual, and I don’t want anybody living with me to save a few hundred Euros, like I did with X, and I don’t want anybody being with me because I love him and give him space and admiration and grant his every wish and great sex, which was the reason I chose X, but I had never loved X, and I was always slightly embarrassed of him, and I made a cold fearful calculation that this was the best I could have gotten at the time, but of course, we grew closer and closer, and the closer we grew the more I despised and disliked him, and was embarrassed of being his partner, and even though he cheated on me, like I wrote D. once, “despicably”, I know that he really loved me, and he is the only one who called to see how I am when word got out between my exes that I was infected, although there were no implications for him because he was safe, and that I guess showed that he cared, or felt very guilty for what he had done – I am sure he thinks I became infected after him in a fit of self-destruction, which is of course not the case, but how can he know that, especially as he himself wasn’t infected, and the most logical thing for HIV- people is to think that if you had unprotected sex with someone and didn’t get infected, that is a sure sign that that person was “clear”, which of course is not the case, since infection, especially from a woman to a man, is not a sure thing at all (although there are exceptions), and depends on the viral load and other conditions. But, not to digress into HIV-educator mode, P. isn’t like that. I mean P., unlike me, isn’t embarrassed of me, and introduces me to his friends, and shows pics of me to his family and friends at home, and hugs and kisses me in public (something that I resented with X and tried to avoid and had numerous fights about, since he rightly sensed that I was far from complete with the relationship).

I have to get to work… I will just say that it was a wonderful night last night. I will just feel it. I might update from work if some unstoppable thoughts cross my mind. I can’t stop… too many discoveries, it’s like one of these Latin American plants that you swallow and the whole world opens up, whoa.