That's What She Said

There is something enormously cruel in having your sex-dream satisfaction stolen by an alarm clock on your day off. Without giving too much away here (and allowing my waking self to relive those brief subconscious moments - mmm, yeah, right there...), lets just say that foreplay had wrapped up on that seedy motel bedspread. Someone ordered an Erin Special with extra headboard banging and a side of screaming orgasm, and I was just about to serve it up, when the dulcet tones of my cell phone beep-booping melted it all. Never to be dreamt again.

I'm not getting enough in real life to let this pass lightly, y'all.

The reader may ask, "But why, Erin, was your alarm set to go off on your day off?" and I would reply, "Dear Reader, you must understand that I generally go to bed in an altered state when I do not have to work the next day, for I am human. Forgive my drunkenness this once, please." Yes, it was a mistake to have the phone even in my bedroom, I agree. But good judgment has managed to evade me for 24 years, let's not go thinking that something was miraculously going to change last night.

And the reader may also ponder why I didn't try to retrieve that dream by falling back asleep immediately. Oh I tried. I tried. I threw myself back onto my mattress and mashed up pillows and twisted around seeking that precise position that had rendered me senseless and blissfully deep in erotic dreams. But the Chicago sun was up and burning through my blinds. The weekday traffic of the city was screeching, honking, whistling, squeeling, sirening below. It should be noted, I live on a corner of acoustic miracles, where conversations across the street are broadcast directly through my windows; where pigeons cooing on the other side of the building seem to be perched on the nightstand beside me, heads confidentially twisted down to better lend me their noisy pigeon secrets. Chicago screams directly at me each morning. It was no good. It was irreversible. I was awake.

Then perhaps the reader pauses, consults a calendar. "But Erin, it's Thursday! Who on God's green earth gets Thursday off?" And I would point at myself and say, "Me, assholes. That's who." Subtracted from full to part time around Christmas, I have since been "enjoying" this midweek oasis. That's right; not only am I NOT getting thoroughly fucked on a regular basis, but I'm also not getting paid anymore than a circus elephant. The depressing truths of my life will be revealed all, by and by. Just hang around, you'll see. I have to cling to the whisps of comfort that I can get, like cottonwood dander floating in the air. All the more biting when they are stolen from me by a goddamn cell phone.

The reader may then ask, "But Erin, you do occasionaly convince the odd gentleman to accompany you home at the end of the night. How can a dream possibly compete with these living, breathing men?" And I would say, perhaps with a revealing sigh in spite of myself, that He was my counterpart inside this dream. You know, the one that exists sometimes as a voice on the phone or a typed word. The one that has lately been pushing the limits of how far west (away) he can go.

So there's that.

And so much like life, the dream has already diminished to just emotional residue. Little context, fewer images. A depressed kind of cloud that is breaking up on what is inarguably a beautiful day. But there is always another nighttime and another set of dreams and a hope that resurrects itself, however unbidden and painful it may be.

But I still look forward to a rerun.