Night Owl Sixty-Nine

The clouds over Olympia had smothered the city all winter long, and I was beginning to suspect that sunshine and flowers would never exist again. The past four months had felt like one long, grey, silent movie, in which nothing much ever happened. Each morning the main character of the movie dragged his body out of bed, inched his way through his sparsely furnished home, cooked microwavable strawberry oatmeal with coffee, put on his headset to begin his customer service job, and before we knew it: the workday, and daylight, was over. On Saturdays our protagonist would pleasure himself in the morning and visit his favorite nearby coffeeshop in the afternoon. And on Sundays he went grocery shopping and made a casserole dinner, which would then be dived into seven equal portions, providing him dinners for the week. The movie was getting old.

It was a Wednesday afternoon when I received the message. Between calls I had been writing a report about the woman who had phoned that morning. She had said, in a very angry tone, that she "didn’t like my tone", and that she "would like to speak to my manager". I was nearly done with the report when I received the notification from an old video chat program which I hadn’t used in years. In fact, I wasn’t even aware that it was still on my computer.

“hello old friend”, said nightowl69. I clicked on the message and saw that we had quite the extensive chat history. The last message was from about five years ago, back when I used to frequent naughty chatrooms.

I quickly scrolled through our messages, which seemed to go on and on. Apparently we had talked to each other roughly every other night for a period of three months. It seemed to be my run of the mill online chat, alternating between small talk and cam sex, eventually fizzling out in the fourth month, where it became a once a week chat. And then silence. The weird part was that it was probably the longest online contact I had ever had with a stranger, yet I somehow couldn’t bring myself to recall any of it.

I was, of course, immensely intrigued. I clicked on her profile thumbnail and saw that her picture was nothing more than a barn owl, gliding through the night sky.

“well hello”, I replied, pretending to remember who she was.

“how are you doing steven?” She remembered my name.

“oh I’m fine, thanks. how are you?"

“can’t really complain either (shrug emoji)”

At this I decided that it was probably a boring waste of time after all, and that this was a part of my shameful, naughty past, which should maybe just stay there. I went back to work.

An hour later another message came. “sorry to message you out of the blue. i know we haven’t talked in years. it’s just that i had a dream about you last night, and i can’t shake it.”

I was intrigued once again. “oh? what kind of dream? (winky emoji)”

“i think we need to finally meet, steven.”

“oh wow. really? why is that? (smiley emoji with stress sweat) what happened in the dream?”

“how bout i just tell you all about it when we meet. where do you live again?”

"..."

“i know this is really weird, but you need to just trust me on this. i need to see you steven… maybe we can meet for coffee? and afterwards we can finally do all of those things we were doing with our cameras...”

With this I started to become aroused. I hadn’t had sex with a woman in years. “i live in washington state, near seattle… what about you? remind me where you live?”

“athens. when and where do you want to meet?”

“athens?? as in greece??”

“yes”

“you want to travel halfway around the world just to see me!?”

“yes i do. i think it will be worth it steven. just trust me” I became erect.

“ok then. if you want to come here ,why should I deny you!? ok. yes. let’s meet at my favorite coffee shop at two o’clock on saturday? will you be able to make that?

“yes, whenever you want darlin. just send me the address.”

I then sent her the address of the coffee shop, and all that she said was “ok good. see you saturday at 2pm steven,” and she logged off.

The rest of the work week was hellacious. From the moment Demi logged off I couldn’t stop thinking about her. That evening I read through all of our previous conversations, and found out that her name was Demi, short for Demetria, which I found out means “follower of Demeter, the goddess of the harvest”. When I tried to go to bed I tossed and turned, thinking about the erotic and romantic connection that we had, which I still couldn’t remember. Even after reading through our whole history, it was as if she had never existed in my mind until now. Reading our chat had been like reading a short romance novel; putting myself in the shoes of the narrator and half falling in and out of love alongside them. Except this time it had been made real, though in a past which I couldn’t reach.

Thursday and Friday carried on in a similar manner, with me not being able to concentrate on anything else. On my work breaks I would read through our chat, writing down notes about things that seemed important. I noted that she was indeed a night owl, often staying up until four or five in the morning to chat with me. She was also a waitress who was passionate about painting and reading tarot cards. She had two cats, one white and one black. And I noted that we would often put our laptops on our lonely second pillows when we went to bed, like we were together, and she would apparently sing soft songs to me until I fell asleep.

By Friday evening I had enough notes to piece together a mental image of her, and judging by the comments I had written to her, she was a bombshell. She supposedly had dark black hair with full lips and smoky, almond shaped eyes. She had huge breasts, creamy olive skin, and according to a comment I had repeatedly made, “the perfect, voluptuous ass of a goddess”.

It all sounded like a dream that was too good to be true, as I am average looking at very best, and admittedly rather plain in my life pursuits and personality. But, according to what I read, Demi was into me nonetheless. It seemed as if we had both faded out only because we had gotten tired of the computer life. Jokes about the two of us continuing our online relationship until we died, never actually meeting in person, had peppered our conversation in the last month. We had started to realize and accept our predicament.

In fact I wondered all Friday night about why she had finally decided that I was worth seeing. Why was I suddenly good enough, five years later, to make this insanely long trip? Had she become deformed and desperate? Did she need financial assistance? Or had years of loneliness simply lowered her bar? These thoughts kept on until 3am, and I started to get worried that I wouldn’t sleep at all. And so, even though I had originally wanted to save all of the sexual energy I could muster for our big day, I conjured up that stunning mental image that I had created of her and made sweet, passionate, exhausting love to us both. And finally, around 4am, I fell asleep.

My late night session had been so intense and explosive, however, that it knocked me out like a ton of bricks, causing me to sleep through my 9am alarm. When I woke up it was 1:40 in the afternoon.

I shot out of bed, exhausted but heart racing, feeling more adrenaline coursing through my veins than I had in years. I was not going to make this mystery angel wait. I made a mad dash around my small home, putting on pants as I brushed teeth, shoving muffins in my mouth as I tied shoelaces. A shower was, of course, out of the question. Some women prefer natural musk anyways, I told myself. At 1:55 I was out the door. My car was, of course, in the shop this week, and the walk to the coffee shop usually takes me about 2o minutes. So I ran.

I must tell you now that I am not in the greatest shape. I am forty-three years old, have heart palpitations daily, am roughly sixty pounds overweight, and have hardly done as much as climb a flight of stairs in the past five years. Needless to say my mad dash to the café was treacherous, but my thoughts of Demi kept me going until about two blocks from the coffee shop.

I stopped running in the hopes of catching my breath and cleaning myself up a bit for Demi's first impression of me, but when I did I realized there was a pressure in my chest that I had never felt before, and that the world had become cloudy and black as it spun all around me. And then darkness. That was the last thing I remember before waking up in the hospital.

I'd had a heart attack. And on top of that I had missed perhaps the most important date of my life, provoking Demi to disappear from my chat history. She had blocked my account and I moaned like a guerilla all night long, causing even more worry for the nurses, but I didn't care. My heart was broken, broken, broken. And this was the beginning of the great depression.

I was so devastated and weak, that I couldn't even bare the thought of going back to my life. That life which had led me to this awful state that I was in. Not even for one day. In fact, I never even set foot in my little house after the attack. Instead I took a plane back to my bland midwestern hometown, Billings, Montana, to live with my mother.

Now I know what you're thinking, that going home to my mother at age forty-three sounds like the most depressing thing that I could do, but my mother is different. She's young. She is only sixty years old, and perhaps the healthiest person, both physically and mentally, that I know over age 40. She always did tell me, after all, that I took after my father.

I spent the next year at home with her. I had never taken a real vacation in my life, and subsequently had enough money saved up to comfortably make the mortgage payments on my house without a job. And so began the year where I worked solely on myself (with the help of mom, of course). We did yoga every morning, went on walks, we painted, played music, and made smoothies with wheat grass. We tended to house plants and community gardens. We had acupuncture appointments on the regular. We danced ecstatically in drum circles. And on full moons we held hands, sitting across from each other, humming (we were working on opening our "third-eyes"). The old me would have found most of this ridiculous, but I had hit rock bottom, and so had nothing left to loose. I had finally cracked, becoming open to the stuff I'd called "woo-woo" all of these years.

And after a year I saw that it all had actually worked, and that I was ready to go back to reality. I didn't know what I would do when I got there, but I knew that I was ready. My life had become vibrant and I never even thought about Demi, nightowl69, or whatever her real name might have been, any more. She was irrelevant and of the past. My life revolved around my well-being now, not lust or a soul-crushing job, and I felt ready to take on the world.

When I arrived in Olympia it was afternoon and there was a chill in the air, yet the sun shone all around through soft, round clouds which seemed to be resting equidistant in the sky, like large, fluffy polka dots. I had taken the bus from the airport to the bus stop nearest to my house, and was now enjoying my walk home in an intense, new way. The city seemed like a totally different place than the one I remembered from the prior winter. It was early spring now, and I had forgotten how beautiful Olympia was at this time of year. I marveled at the many rhododendrons and magnolias that had burst to life in succulent colors, and even took delight in the humble, bright-eyed dandelions and daisies that had joyfully invaded our neighborhood.

After walking slowly and taking it all in for half of a mile, I was finally on the block where my house lives. From a distance I saw the large rhododendron that covered the side of my front yard, its flowers radiating a pinkish periwinkle. When I saw it I stopped in my tracks, breath gone and tears welling. I was home again, and this time I had the eyes to actually appreciate it. After a moment I started my homecoming walk once again. However, as I grew nearer to my home I could see past the rhododendron more and more, and more and more I saw that it was no longer my home.

It appeared that someone was actually squatting in my house! Yet it looked as if they weren't the typical kind of riff raff that might steal a home. My formerly grey and grimy house, along with its weed covered front yard, had been given a complete makeover. In its place stood a small yellow home; one that looked as if it belonged to a well-to-do artist; an artist that lived in a meadow. Various gardens now filled the left half of the yard, with a show of colorful ornaments and gems periodically shooting out of the ground and hanging from archways and lattices. And on the other half a pale-bricked patio had been lightly laid in the ground, giving just enough room for the soft grasses and daises to poke gently through. A small, antique looking table with two chairs sat on the patio in the shade of the rhododendron. And on one of the chairs sat a woman, drinking coffee and reading the morning paper.

The woman sported skillfully curled red hair, pale skin, and blue eyes. She had a midnight blue bandana speckled with stars tied around her head, and a fitted, soft looking white T-shirt tucked into her tight red pants. She was pear shaped and wore no make up. She bit her bottom lip slightly as she read, and as she did this I saw that she was simply, and unquestionably, beautiful. Naturally, I was speechless.

After about thirty seconds of me gawking in disbelief at the beautiful woman and the house, the woman finally took notice and spoke. "Uh.. Is there something wrong darlin'?"

"Well, yes, there is! This is my house!" I protested, trying my best to remember the year of peaceful training with mother. Trying my best not to show all of my ugly to the beautiful woman.

"Umm. Ohh-kayyyy." She seemed puzzled. "That's true, babe. But why are you saying it like its a problem?" She tilted her head and squinted her eyes. "What were you doing over at Johnny's this morning? You two meddling in ‘the astral plane’ again?" she chuckled.

"I have no idea what you are talking about lady." I had no idea what she was talking about. And frankly I didn't care. I was angry, excited, and confused, and I only wanted to be home again. And so I walked away, past the beautiful lady, past the sign that read "all are welcome here", and into my home. "Lady?!" the redhead questioned as I went through the door.

When I walked in I was astonished, as I saw that the inside had been even more transformed than the outside. Vibrant walls, exotic plants, strange instruments, and lively artworks filled every nook and cranny of the house. A sky light had even been punched out above the living room sofa. And on the sofa, in the sunlight, laid two cats curled up together, looking something like a yinyang.