Spies and spacemen

July 28, 1980

My girlfriend sleeps in the other room in fits and starts, turning frequently as if to wake up, but she doesn’t – only I do.

My nights are filled with dreams, and often not nice ones.

Some of these say too much about how jittery I feel inside, desperation and fear, growing worse on the inside, even when I don’t always show it.

Maybe tonight’s dreams come as a result of the James Bond flick I allowed myself to see, and the awful past such films recall in me.

My dream was just like a James Bond film, although I recall very little about it except my running from something, running the way I did during my spy-crazy days as a kid when I watched too much Man from Uncle, I Spy and James Bond.

I ran from everything, the cops, my uncles, my neighbors, myself.

I don’t talk about my growing up with my girlfriend. She wouldn’t understand the total irrationality of my youth, or the utter desperation that drove me away from the house where I lived.

Or maybe – as super intelligent as she is – she might understand all too well, and that scares me.

Maybe that’s why she’s with me a test case, although we all have our own issues.

Maybe she envies my ability to have broken away at least for a time from the stranglehold families have, and how I laid out the ground work for my own life early on, books about spies and spacemen getting me through those early teen years, taking refuge in my room – or when that would not suffice – the local park, or even the streets until the years hardened me enough to put more distance between me and that trap.

She always escaped into books and knowledge, which is probably why she’s so far ahead of me in that way, and is ahead of the rest of this superstitious and ill mannered world we all must endure.

I don’t know if she is a genius or not – but she’s brilliant, and suffers because most men don’t find intelligent women attractive regardless of how beautiful they are.

Their loss is my gain – although that’s another fear I have, knowing deep down even I can’t keep her, and sooner or later, she’s move on, and I’ll revert to being the loner again, living the life of a spy or a spaceman, struggling to keep secret just how scared I am, and how far out into space I have gone, looking down at a world on which I have no real place, having run so far since I was a kid as to be too far away to relate to anything. That doesn’t last either. Sooner or later, I always come back to earth, but it’s never easy.