This one's dedicated to...Chris

Insomnia has set in for the fourth night in a row. I'm not even going to fight it, though it seems that something might be wrong with me. I fell asleep earlier and woke up drooling, wondering when I fell asleep and how I ended up on the living room floor.

Maybe it is the onslaught of sex dreams that started this ongoing sleeplessness. (You know, the kind that seem so real you wake up breathless and make every attempt to fall back asleep.) Yeah, well. It's not like I have a variety of dream partners...just one for the most part, though I did dream I was getting it on with Richard Belzer once. I was obviously watching too much Law and Order.

Chris was my high school sweetheart. I dreamed about him before I met him, though to this day he questions the truth in that. But strangely enough, I still remember that night, coming home from an outing with my basketball team, slipping under the covers and into the fantasy about this guy I hadn't even met. Well, it was a fantasy, but not a sex dream. I was 14 and I didn't meet this mystery guy until a year later when I moved to a different school and became friends with a chic who tried to fix me up with him because he happened to be her boyfriend's friend. Random, huh? I call it fate.

He wasn't my first love, nor my first lay for that matter. But from day one, he was THE one. In fact, I still remember our first date like it was yesterday. We doubled with Amanda and Buddah (my friend and his friend) and we went out to a swanky seafood restaurant followed by a few games of pool at the local bowling alley. When he was opening his crab legs, one flipped across the table in my lap and when he said, "Hey you! Get back here!" I laughed so hard I snorted. Then at the bowling alley I made a Freudian slip that pretty much sealed our fate. The winner was supposed to decided "where" we ate on our next date, not "WHO" we ate...

Anyway. The next four years were absolute bliss despite the few rocks in the road. We became so consumed in ourselves that we both developed a problem with jealousy. Once he asked me why I was staring at a particular house when we drove by because he was just sure that I had something going on with a guy that lived there. I was just as guilty of being insane--my mind was constantly wondering...where he was, who he was talking to...I tried not to let it show as much, but it was crazy, nonetheless.

To this day I miss him, wonder what my life would be like with him. We had things pretty well lined up for a lifetime together. His parents bought us a house, he was working 2 jobs on top of college to get me the ring...and then things went horribly wrong.

But I'll reminisce more about that later.

I will say that we ran into each other last summer at the YMCA. What happened? Hehehe...It was one craaaaaazzzy summer...