Wishes, On Stars and Dandelions

Saturday Evening
This time was very different than last. I didn't wonder, in every stretch of silence between Astrid and I, why she was with me, why she had agreed to come. She was there because she wanted to be there. We watched the water pelting the rocks in the same place where we sat and ate burgers back in August. She sat close to the edge, where the water always sprays up but, we've learned, never encroaches, and I held her from behind and put my hands in her pockets. We watched the sun slip into the water, and the stripe of orange fade slowly over the horizon.

Even with her old prescription she was the one to spot the evening's first star. I squinted into the darkening sky in the direction she pointed until I saw it for myself. We were quiet. Our necks tilted back, we said nothing, staring straight up. There was nowhere else I wanted to be, and no other silence I’d ever felt so held by. We both wished for things, even though neither of us "believes" in wishes. We both recited the "Star light, star bright…" rhyme silently to ourselves. And even though neither of us believes in wishes, we, naturally, did not share them with one another. We discussed wishes afterwards, in our normal, still just slightly forced manner--wishes versus prayers, omniscient beings and the probability that they don't exist. We drank warm drinks at the café and then shopped for birthday gifts for one of her dear friends and lovers. We ate sushi and then drove back home.

We made love that night and we came together as she pressed her cunt into mine. I lost track of everything in that moment of moaning and sweating, or was it that I found everything? I kept wishing that she'd say "I love you" when she was on top of me. Say "I love you"--please say it. I turned her face by the chin and made her look at me. Please tell me you love me. Please tell me it's me you'd die for. Nothing but her eyes and our cunts and our groans until my housemate told us to shut the fuck up.

Sunday Afternoon
We met for a bike ride, me and this girl I have a crush on. But she didn't want to bike at all, she really wanted just to walk and talk. My entire interaction with this particular girl is about talk. So we rode into the Park and got off our bikes and walked on the side of the road near the waterfall. We guided them down a muddy path and chatted and chatted and chatted—about pine cones, and ex girlfriends and gophers and how uncomfortable we both have been in the past with silent moments, but how we’re both becoming more comfortable with them. This thread of conversation had been preceded by a quiet moment, of course. A moment I had to self-consciously interrupt with a babbling narrative of my discomfort with quiet. We, each of us, revealed with a lot of candor what that fear is about. We connect that way. I feel like I can tell her anything, and anything at all flows seamlessly from one subject to the next til we have to force ourselves to say good-bye.

We came onto a strip of grass with a patch of dandelions, seedy and ready for the wishing. She’s a sensitive girl in every way I’ve witnessed so far, and I wasn’t surprised at all that she took what anyone else might have found to be two extreme measures when executing her wish. First, she examined the dandelions and decided to make a wish on the one that had already lost some seeds. She couldn’t bear to destroy one with a full fluffy head of them. Second, she did not pick the dandelion she used for her wish. Instead, after deciding what she’d wish for, she knelt down on the soggy grass, took a deep breath, and blew on the dandelion without uprooting it. I’ve often had the perverse thought that if she’d have me, I would become vegan, in exchange for her letting me sleep with other women. I’m quite sure I would trample her if given the opportunity. It’s sad, really, because I could fall madly for her.

Sunday Night
She got to my place at about 1:30 AM, after watching back-to-back episodes of “The L Word.” We are normally very chatty, Dax and I, but this time, we didn't talk about how our days went, what we did all weekend, or anything. She just laid her lips on mine and we wrestled our clothes off and fucked. We fucked good and long into the morning and held each other and had to get up at an ungodly hour for work. When we were done, I held her from behind, pressing my body into hers, my tits into the curve of her back, my belly into her ass. She told me that J. never held her like that, that she always had to do the holding. I pulled her tighter into me and told her how much I like it, and how much I like to be held by her, too. I said it because it's true.

I wonder sometimes if I get to the love too quickly. But I don't know how else to express what this is that I feel for the people I adore. It's too much to love two people, or three, isn't it? There are all these rules about it, and I half-expect the rules to be right, at least the grain of the thing. It’s inconvenient and unwieldy to love more than one person. But I love all my friends and family simultaneously, right? And don’t I continue to love all my ex-lovers, too?

* * *

Dreamt about Bianca again. That woman will haunt me the rest of my days, it’s obvious. The central emotion there was that I wanted someone who I couldn’t have. I’m not haunted by the ones who were “available” to me.

When I wish for things, I wish with a momentary intensity that disperses as quickly as the seeds of a dandelion. If I have a quiet moment, I might remember what it was I wished for in the first place.

xo
Bree

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