I've been kind of hesitating posting this because it's a bit more woo-woo and
"spoopy" than I usually get, but I finally decided that it was relevant.
So, you all may remember this moment from earlier in my blog:
After the gastropub, he wanted to take me to a famous historic hotel nearby, which has a fancy bar with fancy drinks. . . .
Then we found a tiny (almost closet-sized) room with a little empty bar that appeared to be dungeon themed, though it did have a window visible through the bars. We hadn't seen anyone else up on that floor at all, so we took advantage of the solitude to make out furiously. Ugh, I am so attracted to him.
When Dustin and I were up in that little completely deserted, closet-sized fake dungeon bar in the hotel, there were speakers nested in the corners, and as we started kissing,
a song came on. And it's a very slow and groovy good makeout song that I remembered from years ago but had only recently rediscovered maybe last year via Pandora and learned the name of. And we stopped making out for a second while I tried to remember the name, joking about my bad memory (which is sort of the thing that brought us together), and we made out some more (it's a slightly long song), and suddenly I remembered and blurted out the name. And Dustin had patted me and said, "See, you can remember things!" and we'd gone back to making out.
Well, ever since then, it's reminded me of him. When I was prepping for the fan club dinner, it came on my Pandora, and I got full-body chills remembering the time in the "dungeon."
So, that's the backstory.
The real story is this:
In our hotel room in the desert the second night, I'd been fixing us a couple of drinks over by the sink, and Dustin and I were talking about teenage music experiences. And I told him that my first concert was when I was 13, and my dad had taken me under kind of unusual circumstances, sneaking both of us in over a back fence, because he was a daredevil and a party animal and a rebel. My dad passed in 2005, but I always felt like I kind of grew up to be the perfect mix of his wild side and my mom's dependable loving stability.
So I'm telling Dustin the story of this crazy thing I'd done with my dad, and all of a sudden, one of Dustin's little travel bags that had been solidly up on a shelf JUMPED off the shelf with a thud. It was across the room from both of us and neither of us had touched it in hours. He and I looked at each other like, "WTF?!" and then the Pandora station, which had been playing a Radiohead song, stopped in the middle, like a record scratch, and started playing "In the Waiting Line." And the recurring lyric in that song is "do you believe in what you see?"
And Dustin and I were just completely like, "Is this actually happening? Are you experiencing what I'm experiencing?"
We kind of just held our breaths and stared at each other, then looked around the room wildly.
"Hello?" I said.
"Uh, nice to meet you," said Dustin.
And we were both really just completely mindblown and a little freaked out whenever we'd think about it for the rest of the night.
So, extra backstory on my dad is that he was—fancied himself to be, anyway—a witch and a shaman. He had a whole room dedicated to ritual with books on alternative spiritualities, etc. Growing up with him was the reason I was pagan from the ages of about 12 to about 24, before I got to the science classes of university and wrote it all off. He was convinced he could shapeshift, but I always thought it was just the drugs talking, even when I was a believer.
But I've had a handful of REALLY crazy experiences involving him, including him visiting me in a dream on the night that he passed, before I knew he was dead. The other "woo-woo" thing about me is that I've always had dreams that come true. Ever since I was a kid. All the other shit I can usually write off, but not that, because it happens to me. Dustin and I had talked about it at one point, and he says he has them too.
So I just feel like . . . two people, me and Dustin, who have that weird, involuntary portal to another world, being out in the desert and just altered enough and . . . there was enough of a rift in space-time for my dad to visit.
Now, I know I sound batshit insane. And I accept that. If it were pretty much anyone telling me this shit, I'd think they were. But it happened. Just like the dreams happen. So.
Part of the reason I'm so into Dustin is that we seem to make legit magic together. Not just that one hotel room experience, but . . . the world falls into place. I feel like we're partially creating it instead of just living in it. I've never met anyone where that happened before. I feel like we become wizards or something when we're together, lol.
And now that you all think I've completely lost my mind, back to my regularly scheduled rationality.
