scruta

I dreamed that Shanghai was a woman in a white dress, and I took her out for dinner. She wasn’t a pretty girl, but she had style, and was well built in all the right places. Sometimes she would smile strangely with a kind of tentative haughtiness as if she knew the world looked to her, but she didn’t have anything prepared to say. The dinner went well, and we laughed over a bottle of wine. I talked about my old girlfriends, women etched on the back of my brain in a giant mural, all of them holding hands and dancing in the park of an immense city that holographically defied perspective, depicting all the places I’d loved them and all the dreams that came floating out of our heads as we made love. Shanghai spoke about the one boyfriend she’d had briefly, elusively. I had the feeling the breakup was not mutual, or perhaps they hadn’t broken up officially and she was still dating him. She must have defied a great deal of expectations to come out on this dinner of seared steaks and finely boiled pastas.

Later that night we made love, and afterward I found myself immensely satisfied and suddenly thrown deep into a dream in a dream. Shanghai was a pretty girl now, and she was haughty in a way that indicated she wanted to say something. She spoke, “I don’t need you.”