Another date with Shayla was about to end poorly. I was leaning my head on the dining room table, lamenting out loud to her helper, a day laborer with whom I would occasionally commiserate.
“It’s probably not going to happen,” I said, referring to the oft anticipated goodnight kiss. “And I’m OK with that, really. She’s out of my league. Besides, I’ve really been a disappointment to her.”
Prior to this, I had spent some hours unsuccessfully cleaning the
cat boxes. She was going to move, and it was my one responsibility
to get this item in order. It had not gone very successfully, and I
wound up stepping on a moist cat poop before finally giving up and
hurling the entire contents of the cat boxes into some bushes across the
street from the mini storage.
“I heard that,” Shayla said from the kitchen.
I didn’t bother to raise my head up when she came into the room and brought her face within an inch of mine. I could feel her warmth and the light brush of her eyelashes against my skin. Her lips were within millimeters of mine, and yet I remained motionless, even as she closed the gap, finally landing a kiss with the precision of a hummingbird and the softness of a butterfly.
I pursed my lips slightly to meet hers. It was all I could do. As much as I wanted the engine to come roaring to life, my battery had been dead for too long. We remained frozen in that configuration for a moment before each withdrawing a fraction of an inch for assessment.
After a mutually agreeable number of seconds had elapsed, I weakly brought my face toward hers again and made awkward lip movements. They felt unnaturally scripted and poorly executed, like an out of sync robot, programmed by some nerd who has never experienced a real kiss.
The worst part was that the nerd was me. Like an out of body observer, I was able to witness myself thinking the thoughts and making the motions happen mechanically, but without any of the spontaneous organic chemistry that occurs during a passionate exchange between two people.
I woke up at this point, and try as I might to re-enter the dream to rectify the situation, it was not to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment
I've changed my comments settings to allow for anyone to comment. All comments are welcome, even spineless potshots from anonymous posters. Please, by all means, give me the tongue lashing I so richly deserve. I promise not to hunt you down and melt your keyboard with my plasma cannon. I won't, however, promise not to pout and make that face you can't stand.