During the intermission, I fell asleep and had an avant-garde dream that turned my world upside down. A dream of a lifetime. I had a different name, different parents, and different nationality. I spoke a different language, and my hair wasn’t black anymore.
My girlfriend, Samantha, gave me a question mark after I awoke right after the second half of the movie had started. I showed her the watch on my wrist and put on a mask of a man who had been at work all day long. She then put her hand on my knee, and I put my hand in the popcorn tin resting on her lap. I ate one and fed her one. She asked for more, and I fed her more. I was thirsty after we finished eating all the popcorn, and we didn’t have Coca-Cola like the gentleman sitting next to us.
I waited until he was kissing the lady next to him and sipped a bit of it. My girlfriend wanted some of that Coca-Cola, too. I waited until the gentleman was kissing the lady again and loaded my mouth with a full breath of the beverage. I then transported the load with a panoramic movement of my neck and introduced the cargo into my girlfriend’s mouth by means of a slow and waterproof French kiss. The tongue is key during this procedure, as it acts as the gradual dispenser of the substance being conducted from one oral cavity to the other. Although the whole process brings the carbonated drink to a temperature higher than conventionally preferred, we found it to be a great alternative to abandoning our seats to buy beverages at the expense of obstructing the vision of the movie attendees behind us.
During the movie's end credits, I excused myself to the restrooms. After discharging a popcorn-infused pee, I washed my hands, and after washing my hands, I dried them out with a tissue. After my hands were dry, I checked my brown hair in the mirror and remembered my black hair in the dream. I took a mental photograph of that oneiric hairstyle and mentally photoshopped it onto my brown hairstyle sitting on the mirror surface. I came across Samantha outside the restroom, and I told her I would like to have her coloring my hair black. She asked, “Why?”. I told her it was a lifetime dream I had. She said, “You should dream bigger.” We went for a walk.
After walking a thousand steps, Samantha had only walked nine hundred ninety steps. I turned back to her and asked her what it was and if she wanted to change the shoes for a taxi ride home. She was not tired of walking. She was only tired of listening to me, counting the steps out loud. I apologized for it all and promised her I would count them with the voice of my mind. She liked the idea and told me that if she were to hear me counting a step again, my mouth would end up stepping onto the sidewalk. I found her idea funny, so I laughed. She said, “You are not going to find it funny when it is your teeth that you need to count.” Suddenly, I stopped laughing and protected my teeth with a sealed smile. We continued walking another thousand steps until reaching the hotel where we were to spend the night. Hotel El Matador.
El Matador is also the name of the movie we had chosen to watch that night. We liked to plan our outings that way. We would call them the Homograph Dates, well, I would call them like that. Samantha would call them the Siamese Nights. I was much in love with Samantha, and I was hoping that our love nest in El Matador would witness the display of a wide array of innovative sex positions. The intercourse started at around eleven o’clock and ended drastically after an unforgettable knock on the door.
“Who’s there, and how dare you?” I asked, trying to keep a thread of excitement in the air so as to conserve the sensual exhilaration alive. “I am El Matador,” a whisky and cigarette-nurtured voice proclaimed. Samantha looked at me, I looked at her, and we disarmed the doggy-style position all at once. Who was El Matador? It was the question mark sitting on our faces. Neither of us had thought of a surprise Triplet Date, and I was sure it was not a good idea to ask again who was there on the other side of the door. That’s why I got dressed as fast as possible and jumped out of the window. During the free fall, I saw Samantha leaning over to witness our heroic attempt at salvation. I hit the stiff pavement with the complete honesty of my back. It didn’t hurt much but shook me enough to wake up.
It felt good to be back at the theatre with Samantha by my side, with the Coca-Cola man at my other side, and without El Matador at the other side of the door. So, that night, after the movie's end credits, we took a taxi back home. At first, Samantha didn’t want to cancel the hotel reservation because that’s where the second half of the date was to happen, but after I explained to her how much I had had a horrifying vision of our near future and how sad was to see her dying in my arms, and how I could only spend the rest of the dream chasing after El Matador in pursuit of a cold and disappointing vendetta, she agreed that it was a better idea the familiar warmth of our apartment.
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