Yeah, the dreams continue.
I dream, but I only remember the bad ones. And by bad ones I mean the ones where she’s in them and where she likes me. And even more than a year on, they’re still at least once every couple of days.
They’re bad because I have to wake up, and there are a few glorious seconds where I feel special, and wanted, even needed. Then reality and ‘the now’ crashes around me and the impregnable castles in my mind that the subconscious is so adept at creating crumble into the abyss.
It’s not as if I’m a stranger to any of this, the too-strong feelings. You may need to bear with me for a bit here, but I have had three ‘serious’ relationships in my life. Three women I’ve loved. Been in love with.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve said it (the love thing) to more than three girls. I’ve had twice many say it to me… but I’ve only ever *meant* it, been *in love* with three. For the most part you won’t need to ask why I’ve said it when it wasn’t true. Means to an end and all that. I’m not proud of it.
I apparently have a thing about me. A darkness, a bleak inner shadow that brings out something in some girls. When I was young it made older girls want to mother me, take care of me. As an older man it makes younger girls want to fix me. I don’t get it any more than they do. I’ve occasionally asked them to try to explain it and they don’t seem to be able to. I’m not thin, I’m not pretty. But I always seem to be ‘punching’. Turns out that physically I may be a ‘four’ but as soon as they start getting to know me, mentally I’m right up towards the top end of the scale. I remember when I asked her, (the girl I can’t get past), when she realised she loved me. She told me it was when I was late one night in work, struggling with the pressure of newfound responsibility and she came to see me. Amongst the pizza boxes (I’m a tech guy unfortunately) I put my head in her lap in the dark of my office and told her how difficult I was finding everything about my life. She stroked the back of my neck and told me that it was going to be ok and realised that she loved me even though she didn’t want to.
The thing is (and this is where I do the about face and start heading back towards the point), ‘love’ has always been something of a be-all / end-all for me. I don’t know why but ever since I can remember (and it’s considerably further back than most people are generally able to) all I’ve wanted from ‘love’ was for someone to want and need me as much as I needed them and that means that when I’ve fallen I’ve fallen *fucking hard* and there’s something horribly compelling about that, an intense devotion that drives a reciprocal response. A part of some of my ongoing problems is that I’m able to remember how it feels to be like that and can fake it accordingly to achieve an aim, albeit it’s base and fundamentally wrong, and completely at odds with the self image I used to have of myself, the one where I’m a good man, even though I’m not necessarily a nice guy. But when you *do* fall, you can’t ever get away from it.
And that brings me back to the dreams I guess. The first girl I loved, we were together for a little under five years. We split up in 1998. More or less 28 years ago at time of writing, and I still, very occasionally, dream of her. I mean, I don’t want to, and I know how fucked up it is but on that basis is it any wonder that I dream of the girl I was with for more than ten years?
Conventional wisdom holds that you’ll love, be *in* love with three people in your lifetime. I’ve had my three and I’m determined there won’t be a fourth. If the fact that I occasionally dream of a girl I haven’t seen for nearly thirty years teaches me anything it’s that I am not cut-out for love. It’s too painful, too ultimately-disappointing. The girl I can’t get past is on her third (on the basis she believed I was her second, although in my more emotionally self-destructive moments I do wonder if her third is actually a reboot of her first) and as the third is supposedly the one that lasts (albeit not for me) I hope she’s happy, but I am horrifyingly aware that I will dream of her for the rest of my life.
