Hot Yoga. Ghost of a Girl. Nightmares II. Who I Was. A Girl I Didn’t Touch.

--CM, Monday’s date, told me about “hot yoga”.
They perform it in rooms kept at 120 degrees.

It makes the muscles supple, she told me. The stretch longer.

I couldn’t help wonder what it would be like to make love in that atmosphere.

--LD romanticizes my single life.
He thinks I have the best of all worlds.

He’s in a live-in relationship. I imagine that colors the way he sees me.

--I sit in the sun writing on my lap top. There passes a girl I knew in the spring. On her finger is a ring. She greets the fiancé and I realize this is the first time I’ve seen the boy on whom she cheated.

She’s wearing a blue sweater and she has dyed her hair from blond to brown. She is pretty, and for a moment I tell myself how it could have been between us if I’d pressed forward, how we would be greeting each other in the light of this Fall day, how she’d be in my bed this night, how we’d share a perfect love, or at least one that looked perfect form a distance.

Then the vision of it frightens me. It is not so much her, but me beside her. I can imagine it, but not the real me, and not when I put the days and the nights and the lumps of minutes and hours together and ask it to sustain anything legitimate.

--It reminds me of how careful I have to be of who I choose. Of how I can let the moment, any idealized bonding, sway me. How I have to think hard; how I have to imagine well; how I must know, reallyreally know, that for some long time, I have to be able to hold this person; I have to be able to look into her eyes; I have to touch her cheeks; I have to be able to hear her voice and the stories she tells.

There is no real moment in which such a promise can be born and yet for me I feel it in many moments.

--She’s pretty and soft in the light. She's got a thoughtful face. I see in the way she moves what I always saw: that she is capable of full surrender, the only thing I can accept and offer anymore.

I see her like that and still I recognize her as bullet dodged.

I see myself beside her as one who has grown puzzled, sullen, restless.

--Like the picture LK, my first real ex sent me to prove that I wasn’t as happy with her as I begin to think I was after it was over.

In that picture, the truth was on my face.

--She looks at me only twice. It is impossible to read what is in her eyes.

It is impossible to tell if I look to her like a bullet dodged, or if the boy who has clasped her hands looks like one she didn’t. I cannot guess if she is happy or sad; satisfied or restless; unfulfilled or content.

There is the glint of recognition and a slight shame of secret, and that is all I can be sure of.

I can barely remember the feel of her hip bone in my fingers, the press of her mouth on my own, so many meridians have fallen between now and then, that dark life and this less dark one.

That spring in which for just a little while I tried to make her resemble hope and she did the same to me.

--I have the nightmares that aren’t really nightmares.

It is just you frozen in your bed, with some kind of fear building in waves. You want to wake, but you can’t, and the fear builds and threatens to overwhelm you. You think to succumb to it.

You think to just relax and let it take you where it does.
And where would that be?
You never make it to that place. Your instincts are all against it.

You believe that if you can move only your toe, only your finger, you will wake and be safe again.

--When I finally accomplish it, when I wake, I think: I should have a girl in this bed. That would keep me safe from nightmares like this.

--But I know better. I remember how it has been when girls slept beside me. How I would be aware of them in that still and buzzing black with the terror building.

How I would think: she will save me.

How I would sense that she was awake and watching me from the outside and had no idea of my struggle and how if I could make her know it she would simply reach for my arm, tugging me into the conscious world.

How I would struggle to whisper: help me.
How it felt sometimes as if it came out: help me.

How she never woke me, no woman. How when I finally woke myself, when I finally sprung upright, all my muscled fatigued, sweat on my face, my chest, the girl would be there, silent, asleep, completely unaware.

--LK and me on a mattress on a floor in the poorest house in which I’ve ever lived, twelve years and one million decades ago; plastic on the windows to keep the heat in and the cold out; snow falling.

She tells me the story in the morning.

I woke up, she said. You were awake too, or you looked like it. You were staring at me. Your eyes were very wide and scared, like the eyes of a little boy seeing something awful. And in a trembling voice, you said to me, Who are you?

Who are you?

--We went on for a long time after that.
But we’d already had the vision of our demise.

--When I was a kid, twenty or twenty one, I worked security for an outdoor Steppenwolf concert at the Missoula County Fair. Mostly there were middle aged people wanting to hear Born to be Wild and Magic Carpet Ride and wave their lighters in the air.

There was a woman in the crowd with her friends. She had on a white blouse and she opened it and she peeled down her bra so that we could see her nipple. She smiled and it was the most seductive thing I’d ever seen, not obscene but lmost innocent.

I can still see it all perfectly, her smile, the color of her shirt, the color of her bra, the way it was laced, that small and rounded nipple in that flesh, a promise, a talisman, some kind of magic.

Afterwards, I went to her.

She was a Blackfoot girl and I was a kid from the Flathead Rez so maybe I thought we had something in common. She was in the city for a few days. Her reasons were vague.

I met her the following night at her hotel. She was wearing torn up jeans with patches of flesh visible all over. There was a little girl, four or five years old with her, her daughter.

I didn’t know what to say to either of them. I didn’t know what to do. She told the girl to go into the bathroom and wait. The girl went. She had not spoken at all.

I asked the woman: Why are you doing all of this?
She said: I want to feel close to someone.

--Often for me, sadness is not really sadness, but genuine pain; it more black than blue, or there is sorrow, or melancholy, but hardly ever just that pure thing we call sadness.

I felt it then. I felt it so well I’ll never forget that moment. I won’t forget the exact color of the fabric of her bra or the exact color of the flesh of her nipple from the night before; I will not forget her smile or her torn jeans; I will not forget the daughter who did not speak or how she looked going into the bathroom or how the door sounded pulling closed.

I won’t forget what the woman said about why she was doing it.

And I won’t forget that sadness.

And of course, I couldn’t touch her, not at all.

--DG is the only legitimate “ladies’ man” I’ve known. He couldn’t burn down any girl, but I’d guess about seventy percent.

When I knew him, he had no phone, no car, just a little apartment above an alley where he’d cook pasta and drink wine. The girls would come by all through the evening, throwing stones up at the window and calling him down.

He told me a story about a time a woman was performing oral sex on him while he stood and she kneeled. It was, he said, a birthday gift, and she called it a hummer.

Knead my ass, he told her.

And though her mouth was full, she looked up and said, sincerely: I do. I do need your ass.

--He’s married now, to a woman from Italy; he is, in fact, lost in Italy with her. The last time I saw him he’d gotten old; his teeth have grayed, his hair thinned, his muscle gone slack.

I don’t know if he is happy.

--A NOTE FOR THE OFFENDED--I've gotten your messages, thanks much:
Please don't read the above anecdote as a story about how nice it is to get a hummer for a birthday present
Or how women just aren't smart.
Or, for that matter, men just aren't that deep.

It is simply a story like all the ones in this entry about how we're so often at cross purposes. No wonder it's a lonely world.

--LD, who romanticizes my single life, tells me I have captured the perfect existence.

He says: You don’t have to be alone but you can be alone when you want to.