Because what else is there to do on a gray, dreary Sunday afternoon when you’re broke as fuck and got nowhere at all to go anyway? You can read a book and listen to music and sweep the floor and wash your clothes and when that’s all used up, thinking will do.

Thinking about another lifetime ago, years before long wiry hairs grew willy nilly out of my ears, and it was a galaxy far, far way from the Brooklyn constellation. Thinking about a girl that said the nicest things and they were the kind of things that nobody ever said, at least not to me. She was a pretty, wee thing and by wee I mean really short, not some diminutive sexist bullshit. She was short. And she was really pretty. As a matter of fact there were two things that people always remarked on when they met her. They said she was beautiful, and she was, and she was really not very tall at all. Not that she was a little person and I don’t know what the cut off point is between little person and just short, but she must’ve been right about there.

She told me she loved me and I believed her. I’d been told that before and believed it so it wasn’t as if the words were entirely unfamiliar. It was more that when the words came out of her mouth they seemed to resonate. I mean they shook me right down to my bones and inside my bones. And I loved her back and maybe for the first time I loved her not just because she said she loved me. I’d had a little bit of experience with that too.

There was something else she said that stuck with me to this day. We were walking some through the woods in some state park, holding hands and stopping to kiss, and slipping and sliding all over these mossy rocks and getting our sneakers soaked through in little brooks because we didn’t stick to the trails like maybe we should have. We were talking to each other in sprawling run-on sentences not unlike the sentences I write to this very day, and yes I know that’s what I do. We stopped to sit for a while and eat the food we brought with us and I let her get some words in.

“You make me so fucking happy,” she said to me and she grinned and leaned into me.

“You make me happy too,” I answered. I meant it too, and again, not only because she really did. It wasn’t just being happy that I made someone happy.

“I shouldn’t tell you this, because you’ll think I’m crazy,” she continued. “But I used to have these dreams. There was this little red devil, or an elf that was my best friend in my dreams. I told him about everything I was afraid of and everything I felt so ashamed about or insecure about. I used to be so ashamed of everything I felt and sex and everything I wanted to do. I didn’t believe anyone really loved me or even liked me. Did you ever feel that way?

“Mmmhmmm.” And I knew exactly what she was talking about, except for the elf part. But world’s tallest elf. That’s me.

“He would sit there next to me and twinkle at me, all mischief and fun, but it was love too. He lit up and it lit me up too. Whenever I woke up from the dreams with him, I knew that everything in the the world was just right, and that I would be okay, and everything else would be okay, and that all my insecurity was only that. Everything was okay, and I was happy.”

“Wow.” I was a little stunned, and a lot flattered, and somehow more in love that I had been five minutes before even if I wouldn’t have thought that was even possible.

“That how you make me feel, MacGregor.”

And from that moment on it felt to me like everything was all right with the world and that everything would be okay for me too. I thought to myself that this must be what soulmates are. It was a word, soulmate, that people talked about and I never really fully understood , but certainly if she had these dreams and they came true through me then we must be soulmates, right? So everything had to be okay with the world.

Of course as time went on I found out about other things she got up to when I wasn’t around. Turns out she must’ve had other elves in her dreams too. Maybe yellow, or purple, or green , or blue, but it was clear that red wasn’t the only color in her romantic rainbow. Then the whole idea of soulmates went right out the window, and I made a vow that I would never let my guard down to words and or feelings again because it seemed clear that you couldn’t really trust either. People lie, and you lie to yourself and whatnot, right? I made a vow to take the safe path after that, and that’s probably what I did for a long time, and of course that led to bad choices too. Of course I did let my guard down a couple times after that too and got myself into a world of hurt, but bad choices are made for a lot of different reasons, and there’s been time to sort most of that out.

Most of it. I’d be lying if I said I really know where I stand with all of it. All the love and romance stuff. I don’t take it like a drug anymore, because there’s been enough time to sort out that taking hostages that end up caring for you, some nuanced form of Stockholm Syndrome… Well that doesn’t do more than numb the pain for a spell before it stops working altogether, and why bring another person into that, right?

I do believe now though that my dwarf lover really did love me every bit as much as she said she did. And much the way I didn’t understand novels I read back then until I had a few more decades of life experience under my belt, it took me a few more decades to understand that our love for each other was deep and true, but like the rest of the world we were both all fucked up. It’s the “human condition” as my old teacher Mr. Barasch used to say. I’m grateful for all the lessons of those novels, even if I didn’t really get what was going on when I read them. Similarly, I am grateful for the lessons that I learned on that early romantic foray. I’d probably open up like that again with the right (or wrong) person and risk getting gutted. Shit heals up if you don’t keep picking at the scab.

Everything heals if you let it.