Love Puts on a New Face...

I've had some of the most vivid dreams of my ex-wife lately. I wake up feeling lonely and missing her. Tonight, we were lying in the bed after making love in my dreams -- laughing and teasing each other. It was the first sexual arousal and avarice I've had in months coming off all those many psychiatric medications and I woke up elated. Her eyes looked into mine in my dreams and I just melted. She could be such a pretty woman in her own way and had her special moments. I'm just glad my dreams were pleasant, and not of the many vicious arguments we seemed to have on a regular basis during our tenure as husband and wife. I don't know how many nights she locked me out of the house. That truly would be a nightmare in its most vivid sense to relive those old moments.

She's working at a local bank now as a teller just down the road from my home. I don't know what happened to her passionate dreams of being a librarian. The immediate need for money seems to squelch such aspirations. Dad saw her the other day when he was getting another loan for his business. She's is still driving that Volkswagen Turbo Beetle I bought for her. That car must be on its last legs by now. I am sure our Boston terrier, Otis, is still tearing up the couch cushions and shitting on the floor. She was a rabid bookworm and collector as well. I wonder how many new bookcases filled with books she has in our old house these days. I still look on EBay and see she is still selling all my books from when we were married. All my many Star Trek novels she considered so cheesy are finding new homes.

"Your ex-wife's a big woman!" my father said, jokingly, the other day. Ever so shallow as my family can be. "She seems to gain more and more weight!"

I scoffed and grew defensive. I've always thought larger, voluptuous women are prettier and more sensual.

"She just struggles with her weight," I replied, understandingly. "It's all that pasta and carbohydrates she is addicted to."

My father laughed and I can't believe I stuck up for Rachel. There was a time in my life I wished she would go away to never see her again. I hated her to use a harsher and less kind term. I can be shallow as well.

Me and Rachel had a whirlwind courtship. I met her at the Country Club hosting the reception of my brother's wedding. She had been best friends with my sister growing up and we hadn't seen each other in years. I always thought she was too young for me and my, had she grown up. She was now a woman in its purest sense, and was no longer that pig tailed little brat I remembered from my youth. I was sitting at the bar, drinking a beer as she walked by with a beautiful and demure smile to go dance on the dance floor to some cookie cutter country tune by a less than stellar band. We would end up in the bed days later after a flurry of emails and phone calls. Marriage would follow a few months later. We moved too fast. We were in love and blind to the realities of life and the practicalities of a more tempered relationship. Love seems to put on a new face after the newness of being newlyweds and lovers wears off.

I loved her deeply and I still miss her. There are times I wish we could reconcile. She's lonely. I'm lonely. I just know she would play out those same old patterns of extreme, very extreme jealousy, though. I just couldn't live with that again. If I still drank, I would toast her right now and drown my sorrows in a few dozen beers. Instead, I am left with the raw, sober emotion of missing her -- memories of the smell of her hair. The feel of her skin. Her laugh during the rare happy moments during our marriage. Memories to cherish and probably far better to harbor them than the harsh reality of being married to her again. Hindsight is always 20/20 as they say, and time seems to mellow those old negative feelings of hurt and scorn -- the baggage from a relationship lost. I believe in fairytales, and maybe my princess charming is yet to be met. I do hope so and grow ever hopeful.