the habit of being

Unlined paper.

Still, I have too many black hats and too many pink scarves, though I do not wear them like I should, and at this stage I believe I should have been three years ago. I remember having these thoughts then too, only much more abstract.

I had two dreams.

In the first, we are in a restaurant with green wallpaper, on the first floor of a nice hotel, near the lobby. The restaurant, untitled, serves only breakfast, three times a a day, three different levels, corresponding with regularly scheduled meals. We lay in a very long booth, I on my back, and we are fucking, yet I don’t remember our being nude, or how this came to be. I don’t see my lover looking down at me, not that intense questioning stare, but rather the look of another, a man in a suit at the other end of the booth. This outsider is looking straight at me, and he seems to know something, something more than I do. It seems I’d met him somehow earlier in the dream, before being joined by my lover on the booth. Maybe I’d even thought about sleeping with him. Now he is half-forgotten and perhaps jealous, though I never knew his name, and did not care one way or another whether he chose to remain in his seat or go. Still, oddly, he has power, for it is he who looks at me, unmoved, while I struggle to keep my eyes open in my own little sphere of pleasure.

The other dream, quite different, is laid out distinctly in a black and white which falls far from greyscale, high contrast as my favorite photographs, sharp enough never to be cast aside. It seems a bit like a silent film from the 1920’s, minus only the silence. We are in my room, on my vampire bed at first, then the floor, all a joyous carnival ride, high energy and acrobatic in our movements, the pornographic cirque du soleil. We throw one another around and scream with all our strength, yet are so excited and happy, at times we cannot avoid grinning from ear to ear. The scene becomes such a paradox, violent aspects undermined by expression.

The scene, yes, is interrupted by my mother, who seems to want to prove that I am underestimating my lover’s intelligence, or somehow trying to speak for him. But there were, before and after, many positions, freeze-frames, all fluid and dreamlike and perhaps impossible for those not trained in contortion from early days. (”I was just thinking,” he said, “about sex, and all the positions people get themselves into.”) Most clearly, from all this, an epic, spanning an entire night, I see most clearly him, lying down on his back in the middle of my bed, and myself on top, sitting up, laughing and screaming almost hysterically in my head, so madly blissful and unaware that it would have broken any man’s pelvis, my movement and weight. Here, in the dream, I see myself in the mirror, nude and sweating and blurred from it all, and so strikingly, utterly far from submissive. In the mirror I cannot even see my partner, it is too high, only myself, and I cannot grasp that this image is truly my own. My body seems somehow too powerful, too large, too alive.

All of this is singular in my mind, as I do not typically have fantasies of this sort, and it shakes me, the life I can live in my sleep, when from so early it was always that I wanted to be held down, constrained, objectified, fucked. But this image of myself I saw in the mirror was the antithesis, and it made me smile when I woke up the next morning.

And when I told him about my dream, he asked if I was aware that the Kama Sutra contained a section detailing how one should properly beat one’s wife.