(Written 8/31)

SHOW ME HOW YOU DO THAT TRICK
AND I PROMISE THAT I’LL RUN AWAY WITH YOU

So, between the jetlag and the culture shock, my head is drifting through some pretty weird spaces. Granted, that’s entirely to be expected and I’m going with it, as that’s all I can do. I find that resisting the space I’m in only adds to the exhaustion. Resistance or not however, I’ve been having fevered dreams because I have fevered sleep when my body is not in sync with the general time zone. I’ve been having surreal dreams that, in actuality, are “realistic” dreams. My dreams are normally a full-on head-trip akin to a Terry Gilliam film where no one looks like the real-life person they’re playing and actions are anything but literal. They are what one would imagine Bjork’s dreams to be like, though I would wager to guess that her dreams are actually about PTA meetings, flossing and business meetings.

The strangest waking-dream that keeps plaguing me is not really “plaguing” me. It’s more like comforting me. I keep dreaming that I’m asleep in bed with a former paramour who is my husband. My former paramour, who is worlds away and in love with someone else, keeps appearing next to me. I remember everything about him; the way he smelled the way he held me and the way he grew as still as death as he began to wake. I loved that stillness more than life itself. It means a sigh is coming. He would sigh deeply to pull himself into full consciousness, pause for a moment and then hug me or smile at me, depending on whether or not we were facing each other. It was the least complicated moment I have ever known recreated by my subconscious in an attempt to level things out.

It’s so real that I wake looking for him. My body remembers exactly what he felt like around me, smelled like near me and even exactly how warm he felt and my mind reproduces him against me to alarming precision. And, it’s not so much that we’re “married” but that we are permanent. It is the sensation of being unflappably his.

There is no one I want here more than my former paramour. I want to give up my home office so he can do his work from this desk I’m writing on now. I’ve never been one for desks anyway and this mahogany one is perfect for him. We’ll install an airport and I’ll work on the window bench in the living room. I’ll drag him shopping for home furnishings and plants and we’ll give this barren apartment life. He’ll explore while I’m at work and return home with lots of interesting finds and places we simply must go. As a man, he can wander about foreign countries with fewer threats than I. Between his gender and his temperament, his exploration of new countries is far more joyful than mine and while I love new places, my temperamental, bratty self needs someone to buoy me from time to time. We’ll sort out how to go grocery shopping together instead of me having to ask a colleague to go with me. I make these grand plans and then become overwhelmed by the minutia of living in the grand plan. He does not. I throw caution to the wind and then become paralyzed by the reality of my reckless abandon but he knows exactly all the reasonable things to do once we’re there. I think we can be summed up in the notion that I know how to instigate and he knows how to follow through.

I need a partner in crime. I want his steady, reasonable self around to calm me when I’m freaking out, laugh at me when I’m being silly and his broad shoulders to cut a silhouette in the darkness of the hallway between the office/bedroom area and the living room. There’s just something about the way he looks padding down a hallway, engrossed in the papers in his hand and then his moment of transitioning from deep, reasonable thought to recognition that soothes every frayed nerve I’ve got.

And, I write about the image of my paramour in my hallway and struggle with the dearth of it in my real life as my iPod’s random play puts on U2’s A Man and A Woman. Bono is quietly stating, “But you’re gone and so is god.”

But I’m in China, where you can expect the unexpected in all the best ways and the street outside my apartment has exploded with beautiful fireworks, drowning out my melancholy.