Forgiveness

I dream of one woman.

There are many characters that swim in and out of my dreams: men, women, children, and creatures usually confined to Henson/Froud collaborations.

But when I dream of my time with a woman, not just a romp with one, but a connection, I dream of one.

Every time, she's different. A different person, a different face, manner, voice. But despite the changes in costuming, if I look at her out of the corner of my eye, the differences fall away and I see the same woman looking at me.

She is not anyone I'd met, though she's often looked like women in my life. And she is, despite Freud's breathless insistence, not my mother.

What she is, though, is an unwavering thread that weaves through years of relationships, isolation, infatuations, flings, and slapstick sexual pratfalls. She is the Universe. I do not see God in the world, I see her. She is my own personification of everything. I say that as an atheist, and the admission doesn't change one iota my connection to her.

I am not visited by her regularly, mind. She has probably not been a companion of mine more than 30 times throughout my life. No doubt less; I haven't counted.

Her visits have been profound, and alter my state of mind for a month or more. Typically, such a change is not a happy thing. For years, when she'd visit, wearing the face of whatever woman was most prominent in my life at the time, we'd fight. The disagreement would be over nothing of consequence, but it would be accompanied by such unhappiness, such psychological unkindness and emotionally manipulative disrespect from her, that I would wake in a funk that might take a long time to shake off.

Her last visit was perhaps four years ago. Our relationship was changed in that one. We didn't fight. Or rather, the dream began after we had. She was lying on a couch, exhausted by our distance, and was dozing. I came into the room and looking down, felt all my feeling of betrayal and hurt bleed out, leaving only regret. I lay down beside her and tried to whisper to her how sorry I was.

But I awoke before I could finish and, apology unheard, we did not speak again. In the years since I journeyed through some of the darkest ages of my life.

Then the year just past turned around. And after such despair, I've clawed stubbornly out of that shadow and have nurtured my health and joy for a year now. From the worst, I find myself in what is becoming the best time of my life. Stubbornness and claws being what they are, I intend to cleave to this path for some time.

This week, she visited me again. And this time, for the first time in my life, we did not fight. We were all hands and bodies and mouths, pressing, seeking. And when I woke, there was no month of despair awaiting me, only sunlight and joy and the ludicrous, perfect sense that I am welcome and needed in this world.