The Triumvirate

            I hurried through the banquet hoping she wouldn’t see me. Or maybe I was hoping she’d see me. I wasn’t quite sure. All I knew was I had to get to the doorway and that required walking past the banquet table, where she was standing. I got to the doors and saw the other as she was talking with some other people.

            “Tell me when she’s looking,” I said to my ex-girlfriend as I tried to pull her from the banquet room doorway onto the dance floor.

            “When who is looking,” she asked me.

            “My ex-girlfriend,” I said to her.

            She resisted my insistence that we dance and stayed in the doorway. She was dressed in a blue and frilly dress, classy but somehow youthful.  I started dancing with her half in and half out of the doorway. She stayed in one place between the banquet hall and the lobby. I weaved back and forth around her and toward her. I looked over toward the banquet table where my other ex was filling a small plate with food. She was wearing a purple dress and caught me looking.

            “It’s how I keep my legs so nice,” shouted the ex near the banquet table and she toasted me with her plate of food.

            I looked away from the former girlfriend at the banquet table and at my well dressed ex-girlfriend in the doorway. I shrugged like a child and bolted past her and went up some stairs. I hurried up and arrived at a cozy yet unfamiliar bar and I quickly found myself a seat, which was odd because I almost never sit down at bars. It was crowded with familiar yet blurry regular faces. I felt slightly relieved to be in the safety of a bar and away from the women in my life that have caused me so much heartache and trouble. Not to mention the trouble and heartache I caused them. I felt the panic in my chest at the thought of two ex-girlfriends meeting each other start to subside. I also felt the tearing in half feeling start to pass.

            I sighed with relief and I ordered a drink. I started looking around this bar that felt like a place I’d been to but it was someplace new. I looked in the large mirror that hung behind the bar and sitting at a table behind me was the third ex-girlfriend. I cringed and felt my stomach tighten. She was a little hard to see. She was wearing black and it was rather dark in this strange barroom. I knew it was her though and I resisted saying anything to her. I hoped that she didn’t see me but I kept looking at her in the mirror.

            As I was watching in the mirror she suddenly took her top off and exposed her breasts to the bar. Her soft white skin seemed bright against the darkness of the bar. She didn’t jump up and down or anything, she calmly took her top off and sat back in the bar stool at her table. No one in the bar seemed to notice that she’d taken her top off but me or if they did, no one was making a big deal out of it. I turned around from the bar and confronted her.

            “What are you doing,” I asked.

            “Nothing,” she giggled.

            “You should put your top back on,” I said.

            “All right,” she said.

            She picked her shirt up from the table and started putting it back on. I looked at her breasts and I felt myself missing and marveling at them.

            “They are great breasts. I always liked them,” I said.

            She put her shirt back on and smiled at me.

            “Of course you did,” she replied.

            The dream changed then. I don’t know into what or what happened next. That’s what dreams do. They tease and taunt you with filtered images of the past and mix them in the blender of your subconscious for a jumbled and emotionally draining display.  The purpose of these three woman, all whom I loved deeply and passionately, is not clear to me. I don’t know why I reacted to them as I did. All of them though have affected me to the essence of my being. Part of me was glad to see them. Part of me worried about it. All in all, it was just a dream and there’s no real consequence. So I’m writing about it now, wondering about the consequence of reality.