sex dream: Lillian Grace, New York University Gallatin

sex dream

LILLIAN GRACE, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY GALLATIN

We’re in a warehouse filled with excessive amounts of vintage furniture, and I know that my mom drives a minivan and is on her way to pick us up.

The details come together. I am old enough to live on my own, but I still do not have a license. It is thus not unusual for me to be waiting. Here, in the warehouse, the lights are fluorescent, and it is not cold. If I could drive, I would miss these moments of stasis, relying, passing time. I can feel the minutes, a touchstone with reality.

There are four garage doors up against one wall, and it is only because of this that I realize how long the room is. All of the doors are open just barely at the bottom, cracked and letting in the cold. The room echoes our voices, but in a way that feels almost like a ballroom, something that trusts and expands as we do. On every side, mountains of dressers and mirrors rise, fantastically colored wood with chipped paint. The ceiling is high, and it has a few tiny chandeliers, all turned off and covered in sheets for safekeeping. They fascinate me, their fragility, so unlike the unstable stack of chairs in the corner of the room with the quilted cushions.

I think I know I am dreaming but in the same way I know that I am breathing.

There are five of us here, and none of my friends can handle a vehicle either. I know them all, how tall they are. Their laughter warms me. It’s sometime late in the evening, probably near midnight. We’ve been talking for hours as we always do. I have a feeling that I coordinated this whole event, though my consciousness is too far from me to be sure.

One friend resembles a sprite in the way that she sits: back perfectly straight against the wall, legs crossed, barely moving. Her hair is dirty blonde, a deep sawdust color. Her posture reminds me that before we met she was a dancer. Her shirt is emblazoned with a cereal logo. I think she’s vegan, but the cereal isn’t. I do not remember how we met.

The next has never cut their hair in their life. It gathers around their shoulders, bunching as they pull their knees up against them. They wear four necklaces, if I know

how to count correctly, all silver and featuring some kind of chain. The couch that they sit on is a faded blue and matches their light-wash jeans. I don’t think they’re aware. They only like light-wash jeans anyway. We’ve argued about this.

The third friend shares the couch. Her hair was a bright magenta just a few weeks ago, but now fades, giving way to whatever she’ll next decide. She has an undercut but has always been too modest to show it off. Her clothes are all draping fabric, wrapped around in a way that armors her. She looks good in white. She wants to be a scientist from what I’ve heard.

The fourth and last person in the room keeps catching me in their side eye, gaze matching mine with the same thinly masked hunger. They stand at the edge of our broken circle, the way you do when you’ve been accidentally caught in a conversation for too long. Their limbs are long, chest flat and wide, skin devoid of freckles. Do they wear eyeliner? I ask myself four times until I am still unsure. When I look at them, I get lost. They’re inches taller than I am, but I can’t mentally measure how many. I swear I’ve seen them before. I swear I know what their voice sounds like. They are silent but painfully attentive.

They say nothing, still an almost-stranger, but I know the urgency that they feel by their silence. There is a buzz in the cores of my shoulder blades, and I adjust my posture to ease it. I think they smile.

Now, I am deeply aware of the time and how there are only about thirty more minutes until my mother will be here to pick us up. It’s the same dark outside as before. The dialogue between the four of us moves too quickly with all the laughter in between words, and I know how much time the humor wastes. A resentment gathers in me at the thought of losing any more minutes. My gut tells me to separate myself from the three who are just my friends, their laughter. I cannot tell if it’s actually my gut speaking or just this new resentment. There are twenty-five minutes left. My friends don’t pay attention to me, instead distracting one another with colors and wit. I don’t believe I speak at all.

I am now somehow conscious for mere seconds, lifting myself up out of the dream. If I can be left alone with the hunger, my mom will probably forget to pick me up with

everyone else, and I can fulfill what it is I am aching for. I know this desperately, frantically. I can feel the lost time. I recognize it, a touchstone with reality.

I see the chance that the dream is handing to me, to be more than I am somehow with this almost-stranger I have seen before. My chest pulses, and I do not recognize the heartbeat, a strangeness in such vivid detail, which remains as I am submerged back into the dream state.

At twenty minutes, my white-outfitted friend makes the decision to leave, her hands getting too cold from the night air coming in from the vents and the garage doors. We hug and blow kisses to each other. Each friend holds me in turn, all of them able to tuck their chins into the space between my shoulder and my neck. The one with the long hair tells me that I make them feel safe. Those words reach me for a quick tender moment before separating. I am two selves, one who is holding a friend and another who sees that I do not feel anything. I witness my own numbness, my act and my urgency.

Is this a feeling I recognize from life too?

The doors to leave the warehouse are automatic. They slide open and closed like a grocery store. I listen to the trio, still bubbling up with jokes, stumbling down the hall. They don’t look back or remind me that it’s my mom giving them the ride.

“I need to find my jacket, I think I left it in here somewhere” is the excuse I call out. They do not hear or ask. My words are just a half-reason to fill the space.

Seventeen minutes left on my internal stopwatch, and I try to let the time slide off me now that it no longer matters. The space does stretch, though. When I turn back to meet the last one’s hungry eyes again, I am struck by how directly they are looking at me.

I trust we are alone now.

There exist no moments of silence. Instead, them and I are machinery, calculating in our own minds exactly the place and the necessity. There is a large tilted slab of wood covered in a sheet, sanded and cut from some larger piece. The sheet is gray, I think, some dark nothingness shade. The thought occurs that we may get splinters, but they are leading me with ghosts of their hands. I forget immediately.

As much as I do not want to admit it, I am still very aware of the time, the buzzing.

The blanket weighs our bodies down like it’s a curtain, and it probably is. It’s red, a quilted fabric that traps the heat. I shake all of the chills out of my body because I do not want them to be worried by the coldness of my skin.

That first moment is dramatically still. I do not know what they are thinking. They do not speak.

Then, their hand climbs the side of my chest, through my shirt’s collar until it has reached my jaw. Their thumb moves against my jaw in arcs and then shifts, back and back, and now the fabric between us is bundled. Their fingers probe into the back of my neck, like searching for a pressure point. There is somehow no unfilled space even though our bodies are still parallel and separated. I am captivated by the bridge of their nose. They tilt their face, but I can only see the way that bridge curves and bumps. I don’t feel their hands as anything more than movements.

The kiss brings me so far underwater. I lose all feeling in my ears. The first place that I grab for is their hip bone.

For me, the moment is like breathing too hard into a pillow when you try to fall asleep, except, instead of my face, it’s a humid warmth felt all over my skin. It is a desperation, the way I can only see them in a tunnel vision way. I am not aware of my body really which is strange for me, unconscious of the way it moves beyond my hands. I do not doubt being wanted by them. I am just glued to this movement, something so simple made so fluid. When I was younger, I used to think of intimacy to help myself fall asleep, a lullaby. I used to think that sex was always out of desperation but never of need, never of desire, out of something else more natural, a lily opening. I feel that feeling now, the lily, the opening. I never have, in consciousness. I never have known such a deep ecstasy, muted immediately below skin-level.

Something breaks in me. I lose track of my second self, the one outside of my body. I am both in my body and out of it, free and unfree.

Their skin is so soft and generous, and our eyes do not meet once. I don’t think mine are closed because I see their changing shades so clearly, something glowing, something

like a sunrise. They are not china, but more akin to the face of Venus, the marble dust evened and smooth. In my stomach, something climbs in the way that a tree grows. I can feel them get taller beside me as it does. The space we share is still liquid. Distantly, I recall how I have not touched someone without anxiety curled in my gut in so long.

When we end, we end naturally. There is no lingering feeling, no coming down, just a mutual moment of completion.

The heat is still breathing, an ozone layer trapped between us.

I can still see their breath.

We lay less than a foot apart, still.

I crave their skin again as soon as I am no longer against it, and when I move my hand, I do it knowing that I shouldn’t be.

Their collarbone is a pocket, the feeling of a head scarf, silk in my hands. I do not watch their face. My hands move with some predetermined understanding. I do not hear their breath. I am fixated on the feeling of this being who is not a being, who is devastatingly temporary. They breathe softly, a type of crumbling, heartbeat not rising with my fingers on their skin again. I want to beg them for their hip bones. When fingertips reach their chest, I feel their scars, crescent moons turned upwards, hanging dark and still.

I don’t think I trace them. I could be wrong.

“Hey, I don’t need aftercare from you,” their voice cuts through the warehouse. I cannot be sure if it echoes, but it likely does. They sound too far away, and when I go to look into their eyes and apologize, their whole body has somehow already turned away from me. I don’t know how I missed the movement.

I imagine a jigsaw puzzle made out of their spine, the feeling of something so seamless. It is an emotion I cannot describe. It is not love, at least not how I know it. It is comfortable but not in a kind way. We are meant to stay here forever, I imagine, never doing anything more than touching and grasping at warmth.

The minutes are still there, but I would swear they are longer. I’m not worried about the time anymore? I remake the discovery.

As my eyes fixate themselves on the curve of their neck, their hair gathers, half-mullet, half-dyed, half-mine. I never re-separate from my body, though the ecstasy returns in waves and I think I am still open. At some point, the warehouse motion sensors turn off. I’m not sure if they feel anything. Still, I watch their silhouette all night, just in case they ever do decide to look back at me. n