and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

I think the first time I ever thought about kids in a real way was a few months after I'd met her. This was the sort of thing that guys like me didn't think about. In fact, I was a little scared of kids. It wasn't that I thought they were gross or irritating or anything, I just had a healthy fear of the responsibility involved. Somehow she changed all that.

It didn't happen over night. It's still happening. I didn't all of a sudden want to go out and get a child of my own. This wasn't some sort of burning desire born out of some void that needed filling like a 9-11 crash site. Nothing like that. It was just a realization that at some point, yah, maybe I'd like to have some kids.

Part of me thinks it might have just been my age. I was right there on the cusp of real adulthood and things were begining to coalesce in my mind in ways that they never had before. I was a quarter century old. I thought that was a lot at the time I got there and then - WHAM - all of a sudden I wasn't so old afterall. I discovered an official looking notarized document floating around in the back of my mind that said you can do whatever you want to do, you can accomplish whatever you want to accomplish. I was flabbergasted and I've been spending the last few years picking my chin up off the floor but somewhere in there my thought process went from, "Hey, I could have kids someday" to "hey, I might want kids someday". It was a giant leap.

So I don't know if it was just the age I was at. Part of me questioned if it had anything to do with her because it certainly felt like it did. She opened my eyes to a world that was hustling and bustling right there in front of me that I had never seen before. She made the world twinkle like so many stars in the night. She made me feel like I wanted to share this toy: this earth, life. She made me feel like it was worth sharing. She made me feel like maybe I'd like to have a kid someday.

The whole process was sort of like going to bed in the dark and waking up in the light. Sure, I was miserable the whole time because we were never more than maybe friends - that's what I called it to myself. Maybe friends. That's a place "somewhere inbetween" where unsure sexual tension acts like an electron cloud, forcing a certain amount of distance between two nuclei. Closer, and maybe a great friendship would arise. Any farther and the tenuous bounds would no longer be strong enough to hold anything together; the two parts would float away slowly like a spaceman drifting from his ship, creating a greater hole.

I guess you can figure out what happened in this case. But though I may be a drifting spaceman, I have learned a lot from the experience. People ask me if it was worth it. I meet everyone from extremely bitter to euphorically happy and they all want to know, as if my answers might explain life a little more to them. So I tell them that, sure, I got part of me ripped out.. This hurt. But I felt for the first time, too. Truly felt. Not the kind of feeling that you feel in your brain when someone steps on your toe. Not that kind inside your head. I felt it at the toe and everywhere inbetween. The tingling sensation of an entire body, the whole greater than the sum of it's parts.

So I saw something I'd never seen before. It was like discovering a whole new room of Van Gogh paintings in the museum of life. They were gritty and hard to look at, invoking emotions I wasn't used to dealing with, but it was a beautiful excercise. Having done it, I don't know if I'll ever go back into that room full of Van Gogh's but the point is that I now know it's there. It exists. This is worth something. I think I might want to have a kid someday.