bloodshot dreams

At 2:30 AM in a small apartment in France, everything went sideways. Flying across an ocean to meet someone you’ve fallen in love with through letters can be both an incredibly romantic gesture and a spectacular failure. Sometimes simultaneously.

After traveling for hours and battling sleep through what felt like the most important conversation of my life, my eyes were so bloodshot I looked like I’d been mainlining hot sauce.

I’d met Heather at a friend’s wedding in the States. Once she returned home to France, we began corresponding across an ocean. It was as if we were crafting a Jane Austen romance, but with better postal service. Something that felt real enough to risk everything on.

Before leaving America, I had imagined what it would be like to see her. To talk with her. 

In my mind, we were literary characters destined for a perfect reunion. Doves appearing on cue. Surely, nothing could go wrong.

Just as I had envisioned, she was real. She was wonderful. We talked for four straight hours like lifelong friends reuniting after decades apart. My jet-lagged brain was doing victory laps while occasionally losing basic motor functions. I knocked over her water glass twice. I kept yawning mid-sentence like a narcoleptic golden retriever. But somehow this came across as charming rather than pitiful. Things were going even better than I had dared to imagine.

By 2:30 AM, my eyes looked like roadmaps to hell drawn by a drunk cartographer. But somehow, in my foggy brain, this seemed like the perfect moment to escalate things romantically. Apparently “international man of romance” isn’t a real job qualification. I had confused “bold sentimental gesture” with “delirious poor judgment.”

I wanted to kiss her. It felt natural. The perfect crescendo to our transatlantic symphony of connection. I was basically expecting orchestral music to swell as I leaned in. Destiny was beckoning.

“May I kiss you?” I asked.

No buildup. No subtle approach. A man who looked like he’d been through a wind tunnel asking a woman for a kiss while swaying slightly from exhaustion.

“No,” she said kindly. Just no. My romantic instinct had become a face-plant in record time.

“Oh,” I managed to croak out. It was somehow both too much and not enough of a response. “That’s… okay. That’s totally… yeah.”

I sat there looking like I was processing information through molasses. How had I misread four hours of wonderful conversation so spectacularly? 

The silence was so awkward I could practically hear it echoing. Here I was. I had crossed an ocean. I had stayed awake through heroic levels of exhaustion. Only to discover I had the timing of a broken clock and the sensitivity of a caffeinated squirrel.

What happened after the “no”? She graciously took me to an apartment where I would sleep. Then she returned to her flat. She left me alone with my wounded ego.

I lay there in the dark for the next three hours mentally rewriting the scene. Each version was worse than the last. In one version, I asked permission to ask permission. In another, I missed her mouth entirely and kissed her forehead like an awkward uncle.

I spent considerable time wondering if I had just destroyed something beautiful. Had I wanted too much too soon? Was I too eager, too delirious in my approach?

But real dreams, the ones worth crossing oceans for, are apparently more resilient than we think.

A few days later, she kissed me. I’d finally slept enough to look human again. We’d spent hours walking through markets and talking about everything except that moment. She didn’t kiss me because she felt sorry for my previous performance. Something new had grown in the meantime.

Turns out my bloodshot dream wasn’t wrong. Just premature. Like a Christmas present opened in October.

What I thought was the obvious next step was simply a few steps ahead of where we actually were. I had skipped chapters in a story that was still being written.

Years later, Heather became my wife. Every so often one of us tells this story at a party. Not as the night she gave me the brush-off. But as the night I flew across an ocean and asked for a kiss while looking like I’d been run over by a truck.

My bloodshot eyes weren’t proof the dream was dying. They were proof that I was awake enough to live through my own romantic disaster.

Dreams, it turns out, unfold according to their own schedule.