Ex-Wife

I dreamt of my ex-wife last night.

I only remember bits of it.

Her voice doing its thing.

Her strange apartment on 5th and California. An odd manila box with childish but expressively powerful art on the walls.

I was there with a friend who I was trying to impress? (I’m not sure.) I wore an English mod-style jacket that in real life I’d bought with her at a second hand store on Clement in 1998 but haven’t seen in my closet since 2001. (Did I sell it? Did I throw it away? Did I lend it out or give it back to the second hand economy?)

In the midst of the dream I felt an urge to make love to her. Then she twisted upward as she demonstrated something and her shirt (which was already too small) rose up and I saw a few wild black hairs against her soft white flesh.

And I remembered the hair of her body - on the small of her back - and how much it turned me off when we made love so long ago, but how I made love anyway because I was ashamed to feel that way and had to prove I wasn’t.

I remembered how I used to ask myself — am I really this shallow and venal?

That was how I felt in the dream, too.

And nonetheless I felt the intoxication that drew me to her from the start — the idiosyncratic and striking beauty of her strange and fantastical soul.