Last night we climbed out onto the rocks when the light was low and the tide out. I thought of the day I sent Esther's ashes into the water in Carmel. The mist along the coast, all the cypress trees, the heartbreaking beauty of this place conjured every story I have ever known of longing and the sea and I wept like a child, as I seem to do often lately. My heart gets too full and I erupt in spontaneous laughter or tears.
Later, while we were sleeping, I dreamed dreams of Sophia and her six year old son. I was a street urchin and Ben kept me close, but one night I couldn't reach him. Sophia took my place at his gate and spent the night in his home. She was elegant and beautiful, educated and regal, a lovely mother to her boy, an old and trusted friend who needed Ben's help. I was simple, dirty, poor, not a penny or child of my own. When we woke up this morning, Ben (real, not dream) told me that he needed me as I am, as someone who can understand where he comes from, who isn't utterly naive to the grit of life (I paraphrase).
The other dream was of Hugo and a woman I had made up in my mind, Elizabeth. He had been dating her for six months and was telling me how amazing she is. She was smart, educated (but not more so than he), outwardly conservative, gainfully employed, self-sufficient, and kinky--perfect on all counts. But when I saw photos of their dates, both of them were always in costume, sometimes just a mask and different clothes, sometimes a full get-up. In one picture Hugo was fully dressed as a chicken with feathered headpiece (Ben suggested that perhaps dressing up as a pussy was too weird, even for one of my bizarre dreams). Elizabeth was dressed as a chauffeur (yawn... how utterly boring). She wore a suit and cap, and her face was so heavily made up as to obscure her features. She was, in dress and in fact, the driver. Luke told me that she insisted on these costumes and that they had never really seen each other. He liked the kinkiness of it. I thought he was mistaking their obvious aversion to honest representations of themselves to each other for kink, but what do I know about these things? I have my own quirks.
Ben is making coffee in his Bialetti on a camp stove outside our infernally cozy room at the Ester Lee, as though we are camping. There is a coffee maker here, but he is too adorably sensual to compromise on something of such little consequence. I have met my match.
