I knew from the time I started that it would be fruitless for me to try to talk to her while she was asleep. I introduced myself to her, even though she was curled up on the sofa next to me.
"Hi, I'm Brian," I said.
She politely made an inaudible sound.
I began by telling her what I could remember of my early chldhood. The cases of Girl Scout cookies stacked in my enclosed porch, right behind the French doors. I chuckled to myself as I made a quirky remark about the temptation. I paused for a moment and looked at her, waiting for a response.
Surprisingly, there was none.
I told her about the years I spent singing in the church chior and how I cried when I was fourteen and I told my mom that I didn't believe in God. I told her about when I got my first guitar and I fell in love with music.
And I told her about the first time I fell in love.
She twitched briefly while I was smirking as I told the story of my first kiss in a clearing by the railroad tracks. I waxed poetic as I told her about my walks through town alone in December, smoking cigarettes and envying the houses with the picturewindows displaying a well-decorated, tall, full Christmas tree. "I would occasionally marvel at the colours projected on to me at the houses with magnificant Christmas light shows," I said, solemnly, almost crypticly.
She squinted, smacked her lips, and rolled over.
I told her some of my off-beat philosophies, like the one about how I could live forever on a steady diet of Sicilian pizza and homemade lemonade.
She had no response to this.
In hindsight, I realized that it wasn't funny anyway.
The world had stopped around us, as far as I was concerned. It was she and I on the red plush couch in the basement of 104 Broad Street.
We, well, I, had been talking for hours. I told her about the summer that I went from one girlfriend to another, leaving no more than a week in between. I opened up my dreams of an endless summer to her. I told her the joys and pains of growing up as the youngest of a working class family.
And that's when it all happened.
Now, in a normal work of fiction, she would wake up, see me sitting by her, and then tell me that she was only pretending to sleep and she really heard everything. Then she would grab me, pull me close, and then kiss me passionately.
But this isn't a work of fiction. Unfortunately.
I was in the middle of telling her about my dream to write the great American novel or write the great American play or write, direct, and star in the great American movie when chaos broke out.
Our host for the evening rushed downstairs, flailing his arms and screaming, "My parents are home early!!!" Like a rush into a toy store on the day before Christmas, the party rushed out the sliding glass patio doors, through the back yard and into the woods in a drunked stupor (keep in mind that this is rural New Jersey).
She was included in this mob.
So I was now alone.
On the red plush sofa.
In the basement.
Of 104 Broad Street.
With his parents.... Alone.
In dead silence.
I never did find out who I talked to that night, but in reality, it's probably better that way being that, somewhere in her subconscious, she's thinking of me.
And all the embarrassing shit I told her.

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truth in fiction 1998