What is it about some men?

Last night I had a complex, cinematographic, technicolor dream that climaxed (heh) with an encounter between me and the man who had been the lust of my life. Since moving past menopause, I haven’t had much of a libido, even in my dreams – which is fine with me, since just about all of my past relationships with men have been driven by that fearsome fire. My absent libido has freed me from the need to pursue seductive satisfaction at the expense of deeper and more meaningful human activities.

But there he was in my dreams, as magnetically attractive as ever. Of course, I wasn’t the only woman who felt that way about him, and neither was I the only woman to whom he responded with such enthusiastic sensuality. Our relationship (such that it was) lasted almost three years. Having been married and divorced twice, he wasn’t about to enter into any contract. And I’m not really the long-term-commitment type either, so we were able to enjoy our adventures together, including a trip to London and Paris in April.

It’s been almost a decade since our amorous adventures, and I’m wondering why I dreamed of him now, in such tactile detail. I even felt the bed move as he got up to leave in the dream. Something must have triggered the connection – a certain sound or smell seeping into my sleeping brain. I remember the end of a poem I wrote near the end of our relationship. The poem ended with

But even in the darkest of corners
some things refuse to die –
some small husk still
riddled with seeds,
some insistent root
defying the dust,
some dormant dream
of a riotous clash of hearts,
curious clutch of minds,
a dance of hands that
hope and hold and, too soon,
let go.

She thought she was done with him,
except his voice
still pulls at her belly
like the insistent tides of the moon.
So when he calls
from places lush
with a thousand thriving things,
she sends him dewy lavender
wrapped in familiar black lace,
because, they say,
the sense of smell
is the most visceral,
holding even the darkening
memory of the dying.

It makes me wonder what it is with some men that, even when they’re long gone, there is something they leave behind to make you remember. Maybe some microscopic bit of pheromone that keeps washing around in those streams of our brain chemistries. Whatever it is, he’s one of those men. I wonder what (or who) he’s up to these days.