music, books, love and kindness

I have had this dream many times over the years, though it's not always the same and not troubling like my other recurring dreams. I go to the bookstore to get lesfic titles and the clerk hands me Harlequin romances instead.

It's one of my less mysterious dreams. There's no hidden judgment in the clerk's eyes, there's no "You should be straight, not gay. Read these books until you turn." It's not that at all. It's more of a misunderstanding, plus the fact that most bookstores don't even have a lesbian fiction section.

It's also more like memory and how I used to read Harlequins like there was no tomorrow and how I often projected myself, as the reader, into the male character. Sometimes, if I were lucky, I even found Harlequins that were written from the male point of view, so that the feelings the main character had, romantic and otherwise, were for women rather than men.

Even in the classics, where romantic feeling factors in, I see myself in the male characters, not the female.

"Well," he said blushing, "personally, I'd like to love the same woman all my life."--from A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert

But the dreams can also can be different, and heartbreaking, like last night's, where I found a lesfic plot within a Harlequin while I was waiting at the airport and twirling a paperback rack around.

In the dream, I could see the cover, though I couldn't actually read the words. I rarely can read in my dreams. Still, as soon as I picked up the book its entire contents jumped into my brain and heart.

One thing was for sure...the book was a morality tale, not a positive love story...kind of like pulp fiction from the 50s and 60s, where the main characters could only be together (temporarily) if, in the end, they were severely punished or one of them "went back" to men and the other was clearly seen as "not right in the head."

I turned to a stranger near me and begged for an understanding of why people in love couldn't be together without people making a fuss. The stranger, surprisingly, comforted me and said some things would never be understood.

After that, I woke up sad, feeling bad for the two women in the fake book, who seemed as real as the sheets I clutched, who couldn't be together just because of who they happened to be.

from the front of Desperate Asylum by Fletcher Flora