It’s 4:30 A.M.
The night of summer solstice.
I just woke up, it’s right before dawn.
Something interesting just happened to me. I had a dream. Or was it? Immediately I realize a floating awareness around me of dream memory.
I feel as if I have lived through the same scene before.
I get suspicious. That’s what suppressed memories do when they start resurfacing.
I lived through this before.
In the dream, I am eighteen or perhaps nineteen. It is the last year of high school. I live through an all-night party, a teenage orgy they threw at the end of the school year. It would have been summer, like now, late June.
There is booze and there is dope. I see dim lighting, and in several rooms, teens are making out. Perhaps most interestingly, all of this takes place in an apartment that belongs to a family friend of ours.
Mister L. and his young wife are known to be libertine, so that´s why they would let us do it at their place.
L.’s wife is not present at the party, even though she had agreed to it.
He, on the other hand, is there, with us. He is a man in his mid-thirties, roughly fifteen years older than all of us. I think I had seen him masturbate in the dark recesses of one of the rooms. There is an understanding among all of us that he is supposed to watch and not to touch. And since we have no other place to do this and we are horny, we do not mind. We are grateful for the opportunity.
At around 2 A.M. the party is going at full steam. Some of us, the more experienced and more unrestrained, we get into full nudity and actual sex. I am one of them. I have been an early-blooming flower, since I lost my virginity at fifteen. In the 2 A.M. scene, I perceive myself on the right side of a bed that is at least queen size, perhaps bigger, with curtains. There is a blond girl next to me, and somebody, likely a boy, nearby. I am more intimate with the girl. We are still at that age when boys feel clumsy, they won´t go for the kill in a confident way.
There is a climax of sorts. One. Then another one.
I am in an altered state of consciousness and beginning to feel tired. So when Mr. L., who has been observing us the whole time, offers to take us upstairs and show us where to sleep, I take his hand eagerly. He walks me upstairs by the hand on a winding staircase covered with mushy carpets, I can feel it on my feet. I am still fully naked. When we get into the master bedroom, things take on a different turn. Now he is undressed, and I am too high. I am too high to raise any objection.
We have sex.
It is short and to the point and we both get off on it.
Maybe that is the moment in the dream when I recall with a pinch of conscience that we broke the rules, that he was there supposed to watch and not to touch. Maybe I added it later and there was no pinch when I realized it. Anyhow, I deal with it by drifting off to sleep.
The emotional breakpoint of the story and the reason I would have suppressed it lies in the aftermath of the situation.
One of my classmates, the blond girl who caressed me and who saw me leave with Mr. L., launches a conspiracy of gossip that casts judgment over me. I am not afraid it would get to the adults, because it won´t. Rather, I fear for my standing in the class. I broke the rules, and the pack went after blood. It´s an execution, televised.
Never mind that I was barely conscious. The adult self intercedes into the dialogue with the teenage self. He was taking advantage of me. Though I can´t say that I didn´t like it. It is what I always wanted. The boys were just so lame. Maybe that is where my real sin was found. We are a Catholic chartered school in fact. We are not supposed to do it. And yet we do. In order to absolve us of sin, we need a sacrifice of blood. And I provided it. I was designated as the sacrificial goat. Everybody felt so guilty. Not only did we break the rule of God, we broke the only rule required from us by our gracious host. At that time, we had no capacity to judge it any different. At the moment it also made perfect sense to me that he would be so kind as to show me a place where to sleep. I was naïve. Even though he has just watched me orgasm so I´d walk from there fully naked. I was naïve, just trusting. I haven´t yet learnt about the world. It was still waiting to be discovered and this was one rite of passage into adulthood, one that we all craved.
But somebody saw it and made a big deal out of it. Kids are cruel. They also have the ability to deflect blame and the guilt because being kids they don´t yet live by their own rules. They need to conform to the expectations of the society and the adults.
There is an “after” scene a few weeks later when school has closed.
In it, everybody is fully clothed. It is a social scene downstairs in the front hall of the same apartment. I am there with my parents, Mr. L., and some other people. We stand by the shoe cabinet and the adults are conversing.
I realize how tall everybody seems to be around me. It makes it easier for me to stare down, so as not to draw any attention to me. I feel so bad. I felt like this my whole childhood. But this comes easy. All I have to do is remain quiet and let them go about their business. They will exhaust the niceties soon and we will go. I am glad that there is no need to look L. eye to eye. His wife is standing right behind him.
I get up and I turn on the lights. I deliberate for a full hour as I write this down in my diary.
Could this have been a real life memory?
Could this be there reason why when I met him at twenty-eight when we randomly bumped into each other at a business event, he smiled and waved all over the hall on me? I barely recognized him, but he was all over me, bursting with familiar feelings, some of which I sensed shouldn´t have been there. I just couldn´t put my finger on it.
Or maybe the dream just informed me that the way you see your friends´ teenage daughter is very different from the way he sees you and nothing ever happened for real. I would have just picked up from the environment he was lusting after me.
In real life I recall his apartment to be slightly different, in a different neighborhood. Though maybe that´s where they would have moved years later when they had kids. Maybe it was more of a rental property, or just some place they had in custody.
Then again, maybe it never existed.
