translucent tissues, filtering the light of exploding suns. Multiple limbs with a hundred delicate feelers caressed my heaving pectorals. Then, she changed again, into a mass of writhing tentacles, engulfing me, pulling me into a monstrous, heaving cavern of slurping tongues. Then, she splintered into a gestalt organism of countless slithering, disc-like beings that enveloped me as the room around me turned into an alien planetary landscape of shifting continents and multiple moons.
She wasn’t human; at least not limited to that form, an ephemeral particle in the cosmic scheme of things like the rest of us mere mortals. No, she was, as physicists would say…a quantum wave. A wave that encompassed countless evolutionary paths wending their way across the time-space continuum, branching from countless planets and remote epochs. Each such timeline was like a strand in her web. And she, a cosmic spider weaving that web ever wider. My life…my years…just one more strand she wove into her web. I screamed in both horror and ecstasy, the miracle fading into dreamlike mist…
***
Warm sand beneath my fingers. Soft, warm, moist breeze, the smell of the sea…the sound of the wind sighing through palm fronds and the cawing of sea birds. I opened my eyes, a flaming orange sunrise washing over my sun-browned, muscular chest, my open shirt flapping softly in the breeze. I was on a tropical beach. And, I was young and strong again. My hand touched something. A bottle, with liquid sloshing inside. My throat painfully parched, I put the spout to my lips, tipped the bottle, and drank. Sweet Jamaican rum.
Sweet and potent as the scent of the young woman who moaned and awakened beside me. “Kyle…” she muttered as she reached for the bottle. I handed it to her, and she drank. She was brown and lovely, the wind stirring her long, raven-black hair. She was not Mocha, but I did recognize her, like a half-forgotten dream of a lifetime ago.
“Celeste?”
“You were expecting someone else?” She laughed as she lay across me, her hand finding its way playfully down my side and inside my pants. I laughed as I rolled over on top of her and pressed my lips to her warm, throbbing mouth. Celeste. A dalliance of my youth that could have been so much more, if only I’d had the courage to pursue it. “Enough play,” she said, a look of hard determination coming over her young, beautiful features as she pushed me off and came up on her knees. “The others are waiting for us on the boat. You ready to be a man, gringo? Or, you want to go home to your campus, your term papers and sorority girls?”
I was back. Back at the crossroads I’d passed before. The answer I’d given her the first time through had led to an erudite life of idle theory and empty words. My life , and I use the term loosely, had been nothing more than a memoir waiting to be written, and a poor one at that. Now, it was time to actually live. “I’m coming with you, mi amour .” I said, and smiled.
A wide smile crossed her face, the sunlight sparkling in her dark eyes. She kissed me and held me close, her heart beating against mine.
A life I’d once only dreamed of carried me out to sea like a rising wave. And so I live to this day, from port to port, along the isthmus and the South American coast…hauling medical supplies and guns for the rebels. Guatemala , El Salvador , Nicaragua …Wherever juntas kill, rape or enslave and some find the courage to fight back. My life may burn bright and short, but I wouldn’t trade it for my weight in gold if I had to go back to the life I’d lived before. That life has faded like a gray, musty dream. Was it no more than a dream, after all? Or, is this the dream?
I care not. This to me is the only reality. The wind carries me over the pitching waves into the rising sun. And, on the evening breeze with the first rising stars…always, the
She wasn’t human; at least not limited to that form, an ephemeral particle in the cosmic scheme of things like the rest of us mere mortals. No, she was, as physicists would say…a quantum wave. A wave that encompassed countless evolutionary paths wending their way across the time-space continuum, branching from countless planets and remote epochs. Each such timeline was like a strand in her web. And she, a cosmic spider weaving that web ever wider. My life…my years…just one more strand she wove into her web. I screamed in both horror and ecstasy, the miracle fading into dreamlike mist…
***
Warm sand beneath my fingers. Soft, warm, moist breeze, the smell of the sea…the sound of the wind sighing through palm fronds and the cawing of sea birds. I opened my eyes, a flaming orange sunrise washing over my sun-browned, muscular chest, my open shirt flapping softly in the breeze. I was on a tropical beach. And, I was young and strong again. My hand touched something. A bottle, with liquid sloshing inside. My throat painfully parched, I put the spout to my lips, tipped the bottle, and drank. Sweet Jamaican rum.
Sweet and potent as the scent of the young woman who moaned and awakened beside me. “Kyle…” she muttered as she reached for the bottle. I handed it to her, and she drank. She was brown and lovely, the wind stirring her long, raven-black hair. She was not Mocha, but I did recognize her, like a half-forgotten dream of a lifetime ago.
“Celeste?”
“You were expecting someone else?” She laughed as she lay across me, her hand finding its way playfully down my side and inside my pants. I laughed as I rolled over on top of her and pressed my lips to her warm, throbbing mouth. Celeste. A dalliance of my youth that could have been so much more, if only I’d had the courage to pursue it. “Enough play,” she said, a look of hard determination coming over her young, beautiful features as she pushed me off and came up on her knees. “The others are waiting for us on the boat. You ready to be a man, gringo? Or, you want to go home to your campus, your term papers and sorority girls?”
I was back. Back at the crossroads I’d passed before. The answer I’d given her the first time through had led to an erudite life of idle theory and empty words. My life , and I use the term loosely, had been nothing more than a memoir waiting to be written, and a poor one at that. Now, it was time to actually live. “I’m coming with you, mi amour .” I said, and smiled.
A wide smile crossed her face, the sunlight sparkling in her dark eyes. She kissed me and held me close, her heart beating against mine.
A life I’d once only dreamed of carried me out to sea like a rising wave. And so I live to this day, from port to port, along the isthmus and the South American coast…hauling medical supplies and guns for the rebels. Guatemala , El Salvador , Nicaragua …Wherever juntas kill, rape or enslave and some find the courage to fight back. My life may burn bright and short, but I wouldn’t trade it for my weight in gold if I had to go back to the life I’d lived before. That life has faded like a gray, musty dream. Was it no more than a dream, after all? Or, is this the dream?
I care not. This to me is the only reality. The wind carries me over the pitching waves into the rising sun. And, on the evening breeze with the first rising stars…always, the