Song of the Week: Last Night I Dreamt that Somebody Loved Me

Hot story tomorrow, but first:

Friday night I was on a date with myself, walking across the middle of the city to a storytelling show (Theme: Excitable! Apt.) when the Smiths shuffled on. I remembered the last time I’d heard this song, the day Icried sex tears (and regular tears) for SG. I’ve never told you this, but that was two days after my last and worst fight with Sweetie, the one where I felt so scared and trapped that I actually jumped out of the car while it was moving. The day I played with SG, there was a big bandage on my foot covering the place where the road had scraped away my skin. My knees were covered with bad bruises that made it hard to kneel down in front of him.

Probably I shouldn’t have been playing with anyone, should have been, I don’t know, on the run? In the hospital? In some sort of women’s facility? But I’m glad I was crazy enough to try to keep going on with my life the way I wanted it, not the way it actually was.

I’m glad that time isn’t just defined by the scars. Instead, I got a momentary  visit the life I really wanted, covered with that warm and vital man, every corner of my body touched and ravished, animal life coursing through me. Of course, I knew it was only a simulacrum, a shadow, a glimmer, but it was enough to yank that desire up from me and get me to the right place, which, lonely as it is, is here.

“Real arms around me,” Morrissey sang, and that plus whatever part of my soul woke up that day was enough to make me walk away from twelve years of compromise, love, and deep shame. Both visceral and not-real, it was enough to push me towards whatever real love is or is not waiting for me on the other side of all this.

I’m so far way from “real arms around me” in the romantic sense, so far from the thing I gave up everything awful and good for. There’s a scar on my foot and too many bad stories that tell me what happens when I compromise my feelings, when I fight my fear or my grief or my love, so I’m teaching myself to surrender to all of it, just as much as real life will let me.

As painful as it is to recall that scene and that glimmer knowing he’s maybe not even a friend, I’m grateful all the way to my bones that he gave me something other than a scar to go on, that that moment pulled me up from denial and made it impossible not to say aloud what I really wanted.

I hope real love is waiting on the other side of this detached and achy interval, but I really can’t begin to thank the world for the miracles I’ve managed to experience so far. Adventures, you’ve saved me, or better yet, you made me save myself.