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| Wednesday, August 09, 2006 |
| My hump, my hump, my hump, my hump |
Happy Hump Day. I just like to say Hump. I hope everyone is well. I’m alright. Nothing too exciting. I’ve been feeling like I’m coming down with something lately. Kinda warm and miserable feeling. I don’t know. I tend to get colds in the summer when they are the least pleasant to have.
I had a strange dream last night about a girl I used to know. The dream was a normal, disjointed, no sense of reality, type thing. But the girl was someone I hadn’t thought of in a long while. Here’s the story.
Back around 1998, I was living by myself. I was working as a district manager of a large retail store chain. It was incredibly stressful and all consuming. I worked over sixty hours a week, easily. I traveled between Louisville, Columbus and Dayton multiple times a week. It was killing me. I was sick all the time, drinking a lot, never happy. After one particularly brutal week, I up and quit. I couldn’t do it anymore. I was physically beaten and psychologically exhausted. I just left a letter on my V.P.’s desk along with my cell phone. I sat at home for a few days, not answering the phone, not doing much of anything. At one point while browsing the internet, I found a website for a commune in West Virginia. Yes, a commune. An old-fashioned, hippy commune. It had been around since the early 70’s. The website said that they welcomed visitors as long as they were willing to help out around the farm. I decided this is what I needed. I emailed someone there and they said, “Come on down.” So, I packed up my car and headed off. I didn’t tell anyone anything. I just left. It was nearly an eight hour trip to the mountains of Eastern West Virginia where this place was located. I wasn’t sure my car was going to make it. It was a jeep I had bought right after high school and it had seen better days.
Finally I arrived. It was pretty much what you would expect to find at a commune. There were about twenty or so permanent residents, and another five or six visitors. The permanent residents were a mixture of old hippies and new hippies. People in their forties and fifties and then youngsters, age twenty-something. I put up in a big tent they called a “yurt”. I had the place to myself. The commune had beds for nearly fifty people or so. It really was a decompressing experience for me. I got to live life in the slow lane for a while. I’d wake up, eat, and help out around the farm. Have dinner with everyone, then sit around talking or listening to someone play music. I loved the place. I felt so relieved to be free of all the crap I had been carrying. I went for weeks happy as a clam.
During that time I met a girl. She was 19. I was 29 at the time. And her name was, I shit you not, Rain. At least that was the name she gave herself. She was from Cincinnati and had left after her first year of college to live at the farm. I couldn’t get much out of her about her past, and I didn’t ask too many questions. From what I gathered, her parents were really wealthy and she was pretty much on her own. It sounds cliché and tacky, but her youth and exuberance was what I needed then. She made me feel young again. Like I said, I was only 29, but I felt 59. I felt worn out by life. She made me feel like life could be enjoyable. She was beautiful and thin as a rail. Her living area was an old school bus she had turned into a house of sorts. I spent every night with her. We had great sex, uninhibited, wild, crazy sex. The place was very open. Their were a few nudists, mostly guys. One guy who was building a barn would wear nothing but a tool belt and boots. Nice image, eh? We’d swim in the pond naked with everyone else. People would have sex out in the open. It was the sixties, all over again.
After a while, I started to feel guilty. I had left a lot of people in the lurch. I had emailed some of my family to let them know I was ok, but I didn’t tell them where I was. I also had started a relationship with someone right before I had quit. She would eventually become my second wife, but at the time, we had just started casually going out. I had left without telling her anything. I did email her once, just to let her know I was alive, but I never replied to any of her emails after that. I didn’t want to deal with anything from home.
More importantly, I was starting to really feel bad about not being a father to my kids. When I was working constantly, I always had an excuse and I didn’t have time to think about shirking my responsibilities. I was paying child support, and I was making good money so they were getting taken care of, but I didn’t do much as a father. When I quit, I had four weeks of vacation due plus bonuses, so I received a big final check. I took all but a small amount of money and had it transferred to my ex for the kids. But again, I wasn’t being a dad. Since had been down there and had time to think about my life, it had been pressing on me. My dad wasn’t around much as a kid. He traveled all over the world and was gone for weeks at a time. I apparently was dealing with my life the same way. It got to the point where I wasn’t feeling peaceful and happy anymore. I loved being at the farm, but it felt wrong.
One day, lying in bed with Rain, she just up and looked at me and said, “So when are you going home?” I was a bit stunned, but I knew we were thinking the same thing. I made some b.s. comment, I’m not leaving, or something. She just said that we both knew it was time for me to go home and get back to my real life. And it was. I was astounded by how perceptive she was, especially at such a young age. And she wasn’t mad. She knew it was what I had to do and that made her ok with it.
So, one morning she helped me pack up and I headed home. I haven’t seen her since. I’ve emailed her on and off throughout the years. She went back to school eventually and now teaches school in West Virginia near the farm. At least the was the last I had heard a few years ago.
And, I hadn’t thought of her in years, until last night’s dream. Makes me wonder if I’m supposed to do something. Any ideas? |
posted by dusio @ 8/09/2006 03:35:00 PM   |
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| 2 Comments: |
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call her?
try. it's always great renewing old friendships, but it's kinda' weird at the same time: you are you and she is she but at the same time things are so different, but you find out that inspite all the years you can still find the person you knew in that aged body, lol i'm talkin' about agin and i'm 20 sth. lol
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Name: dusio
Home: columbus, ohio, United States
About Me: Jaded, regretful, bitter and sarcastic. But a great guy!
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e-mail her?