While We Were Sleeping Is Never Safe for Work

Venus retrograde approaches; my dreams heat up. I won’t even get into the mixed messages I’m receiving in waking life from those I desire and those I do not. I’ll just ill-advisedly share the dream I was sent last night from my greatest long-lost lover, he whose spirit sends me a postcard in the dream world every four years or so. In real life we’ve not spoken since my thirtieth birthday when he said, I don’t know if I can live without you but I’m going to try, and I didn’t get up from the kitchen floor until long after he’d left the country. Last night’s visit was such a middle-aged fumbling–rusty, desperate, hot.

I’m in London for the first time in decades–not the grand success I’d hoped to be but enough of one to be flown out for an event. I don’t dare get in touch with T. I fear I’ll seem pathetic and grasping; he, slick and stuck. But he hears I’m in town and makes a point of inviting me to his house for dinner. His wife–tall and vaguely blond, vague in general but maybe not so vague–studies me sharply, skeptically over carefully curated organic fare. Quinoa, microgreens, copperhead salmon, oy vey. T. is still T., bright-eyed, beautiful though slightly more out of focus–heavier bellied, blurrier around the edges. All of which applies to me too. He is still so appealingly tall and long-limbed, big-pawed, intoxicatingly scented. To me, anyway. I have no idea what he smells like to anyone else. Mine mine he smells like mine. Shit. I can feel this Venus retrograde rising, also the greedy need of tonight’s lunar eclipse in Leo. His wife steps not even outdoors but downstairs to clean up and he lumbers toward me in his expensively appointed den. We need to fuck fast, he breathes, and I’m genuinely shocked. What’s the point? It will destroy everything–his wife’s faith, his family unit, my good memories. He can’t possibly be this hard up. I’ve lost my job, he pants. None of this is working. I just want to fuck you, be inside us. Well. I know that feeling; it’s never gone away since our first date in 1999 Brooklyn when I climbed all over him like the baby baby he called me in bed and then everywhere else. So there it is again quick as can be, his long sturdy cock crooked all the way inside me, my legs wrapped around his waist, us against a desk a wall a floorlamp (crash) like the old days when were young and perfect and barely hatched. His wife comes in and we don’t untangle. Nor do I wake up.

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy