HelluvaGirl

Last night, I dreamed Genius again.

I’d dream him all those years since I dramatically moved to Vilnius, as someone once put it. Because it was the autumn I moved here that I met him, and it was 11 years ago.

He was sitting at the bar at the place where I’d later become a regular. He was watching me, I could see that while he was flirting with a waitress. He knew them by names.

He was interested. I think at some point I needed a lighter, and that’s how it started – with fire.

The thing is, the balance of curiosity soon shifted as I heard him speak.

I bought it instantly. Everything: the fact he was a photographer, a copywriter, a traveller and a Genius. That’s what his business card in fact said.

And that’s exactly where I think I lost him. Only too late I realised he always saw much more than I gave him credit for – he saw that I was his for taking, despite my trained bluntness and fake balls. It was my initial and fatal weakness in the game of two people too broken to ever blissfully be intimate with someone without the proximity of a next-morning farewell.

Anyway, the dream. It’s the second one that are different from all the others. It’s the second one where we meet at this bar in this town I dream time and again (it has streets I recognise and places I go to – its air smells like sea), and he’s dressed in his shabby chic as always, and he’s smoking, and his voice is harsh.

But he calls me the love of his life. He uses the ultimate words like girlfriend or wife, or something I never heard him say, in neither reality.

The closest he got to it was the night at an Indian restaurant where we were a little tipsy and he was introducing me to his friend.

She is my dream that never came true. And now, I can hear her think: you did nothing for me to come true.

He was right, of course. I thought precisely that.

My Genius dreams have always been restless, messy and heart-breakingly pointing to the fact I was nothing to him. Imagine me, the narcissist, feeling as nothing. It’s unbearable in any reality. I would be an isolated and invisible observer of his feasts with crowds of people. I’d be his waitress. I’d be a passer-by, unnecessary and hardly recognised.

What happened now?

We meet at this bar in this town, he’s dressed in his shabby chic, he’s smoking, his voice is harsh. This, I know.

You, it’s you…

He beams and calls me something beautiful and genuinely tender, which my conscious mind can’t even handle to merge with the Genius persona I know.

Or can it be… me and my own projection? It was different before. Now that I seized punishing myself, depending on someone else’s attitudes, now that I am closer to Love, I meet a transformed Genius who was always me. He was always my own creation – in every reality. He was my own reflection, and this is what’s transformed.

If it is true, I must admit I can’t believe how well I am. Is he?

I look at him and think: this is the person I arrive to as one arrives wounded to an emergency hospital, but this is someone I know nothing about, and who has never really known me.

Well, maybe just a little bit. After all, he was the first to read me. He said I wrote like a man. And that I shouldn’t stop.

I look at him, and it’s everything in the world, and I truly can’t utter a word. In every reality I know.