Part 1: Meeting Rachel

I don’t have many dreams. To me sleep is a mini death with a resurrection in the morning. My name is Jeff, and I met the woman of my dreams in a dream. Her name is Rachel, and I met her in a downpour at the edge of a steep cliff deep in the Rocky Mountains.

This all sounds batshit crazy, but in the dream I stood there peering into a cloudy, rainy nothingness, my body shivering from the cold and the rain, preparing to jump to my death when I feel a soft tap on my right shoulder. Standing there is a woman with long hair. In the dark I could not make out her features. She reached out and placed her palm on my forehead.

This part is hard to explain as it manifested in the unfamiliar dream state I found myself in, but we connected in a way not possible in the real world. I learned everything about her, and I knew nothing. I bared all to this woman, and she opened her heart in a way impossible to verbalize. I wished to see her face. Then the weather cleared in an instant, and the sun shone a second later as can only happen in a dream, and I studied her features for what seemed like hours. Was it milliseconds? A few heartbeats? A single breath?

The next day I called a realtor and listed my house. Within a week I gave away everything which didn’t fit in the back of my truck-mounted camper. I quit my job as a pirate on the tourist boat, and within a week I drove west to find Rachel.

But let me take a step back for a second. I live in Port Aransas, Texas in a tiny house with less than five hundred square feet. I buy nothing large, so I purchase little things. Tiny thingamabobs, small curios, and place them on narrow wooden shelves I build from reclaimed wood. On them, I put mementos from my life. Every major milestone in my meager existence represented by a small figurine, an item purchased to cherish the moment or just something found on the ground. If it was small, and I had a connection with the thing up on a shelf it went.

On a small nook in the loft’s corner is a shelf with only one item on it, a small diamond ring that had been my grandmothers. I planned to use the ring to marry a woman from Hong Kong who I met on an online dating site. She thought I was joking when I told her I am a pirate. Amazingly, I convinced her to come to visit me in the states. When she was here, we spent our time on the beach swimming, lying around, going to restaurants and getting to know each other. We were at Joe’s Crab Shack when I popped the question. Joe is a friend of mine, so he let me stow my pirate uniform in the kitchen. I told Ying Yue I had to use the restroom and went to the kitchen and put on my pirate gear.

You should have seen the look on her face when she realized the pirate brandishing a sword in one hand and a small box in the other was me. Her green eyes burned with intensity as she watched me walking in her direction. And yes, I understand in novels there is an overabundance of Chinese beauties with green eyes, but remember I met Ying on a dating site. I only corresponded with women with green eyes, and I spent years searching for a girl that looked exactly like the woman I proposed to at Joe’s.

I got down on one knee, handed my sword to Ying, and said, “Arrrgh, will you marry me?”

Her answer, “I ought to cut your fool head off, but yes. Yes, I will marry you.”

The next day at the airport in Corpus Christi she asked me to hold out my hand. I did. She put the wedding ring in my hand, closed my fingers around it, turned her back, and boarded a flight back to Hong Kong. I never saw her again. I built a tiny shelf in the loft, placed the ring on it, and never touched it again. My soul crushed.

There were other girls but no more engagements. It’s silly, but I promised my grandmother before she died I would never part with the ring–that I would give it to my bride someday. After that day at the airport with Ying I could not touch the ring. This ring was not my precious. It haunted me. I even slept on the pull-out bed on the main floor to keep away from it. The loft became a bleak forest of pain, a place I dared not venture, and when your house is tiny that sucks big time!

It’s tough to let go of “things,” but I had no intention of coming back so let go I did. At first, I panicked as I let everything drift away, but the more I got rid of stuff, the better I felt. I was peeling away layer upon layer of the fleshy onion skin I encased myself in. I was searching for the center, the core. Did I even have one? I feel sorry for people who own lots of stuff as material things own you, pulling one under dark waters where the naiads live, starving you of oxygen. With everything gone and nothing left but the contents of the truck, it’s as if someone had removed a million pounds from my chest. I could breathe once again.

Well, enough backstory I think? I could tell you about the time on the pirate ship when I accidentally sliced the arm clean off a tourist from Alabama, but that never happened, so I won’t.  With my house emptied and cleaned I had nothing left to do but drop off my house keys at my girlfriend’s place and hit the road. I placed all my mementos in the treasure chest where I stored my street clothes at work when swashbuckling in the calm Gulf waters. Everything, that is, except for my grandmother’s ring which I left behind. I made a deathbed promise to keep it, but this was my chance to break free of the ring’s curse. If Bilbo managed it–so can I.

The treasure chest? Mark from Calico Jack where I work gave it to me when I left my job. “Dude,” he said. “You are the best damn pirate to sail these parts. I don’t normally do this but after ten years. Well, after ten years I want you to take this.” With a flourish, he pulled a Jolly Roger off a big lump in the middle of the floor revealing a chest containing my pirate uniform and six bottles of rum. A pirate’s life for me.

A girlfriend? Why yes, I have one of those. Well, sorta. Her name is Tammy, and she is an oyster shucker from Baton Rouge. She is my girl and not my girl. Did you ever have a girlfriend that you loved but she did not love you back, and yet you still dated? I guess it’s an unhealthy relationship, but it’s the only one I have. We never make love. Sometimes we kiss. We hold hands. She hugs me a lot and tells me everything will be OK. I have a terrible habit of staying up all night reading about World War Three, the war all the pundits say is coming soon. It scares the hell out of me, and sometimes I drink too much. No, I always drink too much. Drinking to the end of everything. Drinking to darkness. Drinking to the radioactive shockwave that will sweep away my atoms and scatter them across a bruised and battered earth. You know, positive stuff.

That’s how we met. Tammy had just got off from work at the restaurant on the jetty. She found me passed out face down in the sand on the beach. I drank that night after reading a mess of articles on Russia’s new nuclear torpedoes. Do the governments designing and building these horrors know how these weapons influence people’s psyches? Sure they do. That is the whole point I guess. I do my best to hide from the news, but it always finds me. Anyway, I thought she was Putin’s grandmother come to deal the final blow. A knee-high black boot to the head is what I expected. Instead, she rolled me over and said, “God, what a mess.” She drove me to my place and left me there. The next day she came by to bring me bottled water and some food and our relationship took off.

OK, so I get to her house and knock on Tammy’s door. She is the skinniest girl on the planet and always wears her hair in pigtails. Her right arm is beefier than her left because of all the years shucking oysters, a food I despise. Those squirmy things give me the heebee jeebees just thinking about them. She opens the door, and I walk into her place and plop down on the couch. On her stereo is playing Marina and the Diamonds. I think the song is Teen Idol, but I am not sure. Tammy’s house is full of animals she has rescued and is in the process of rehabilitating. It’s only this moment I realize I am one of them. I look to the right of the couch and see a small aquarium with a wounded crab hanging out on a small sand berm. Fist Pump, I think to myself.

She starts the conversation. “Who is Rachel?”

“I met her in a dream.”

Tammy eyes me suspiciously. “Is she another one of those apocalyptic nuclear silo chicks? You gonna leave me for–for what? A dream? Something that don’t exist?”

“She exists,” I reply. Tears forming in my eyes. “She exists, dammit. I’m telling you.”

Tammy shakes her head and looks at me with sad brown eyes. The same way she looks at the three-legged dog that comes shakily into the room. We both go perfectly still and stare at each other for a few minutes. I do my best to pull myself together, trying to calm my breathing. Tammy comes over and sits next to me on the couch. The three-legged dog jumps on our laps, sprawled between us. Tammy turns my way and gives me a big hug. She cries. Hell, I swear the dog and the crab and a cat missing an ear cry. We all cry. Tammy cries because her misfit human is going away unhealed. I cry because I fear goodbyes more than anything in this world. The dog cries because we cry. The cat cries thinking of the day a human took her ear and tossed her from a moving car. The crab had no clue why it cried. The tears did their best to wash away all of our sins.

OK, give me a minute. I need to collect myself.

I need a drink. Where was I? So, I signed the house over to Tammy earlier, and her mission was to sell the place, collect the proceeds, and send me the money when possible. I promised to send her an address when I had one, but between you and me, I wasn’t sure I would ever have one again. Not much work for pirates in the Rocky Mountains.

>> Go to part 2…