Brainstorm # 9

Another hot afternoon; another run, no wait...it was more like a jog than a run. I was just so tired from the mornings happenings that I had to slow my stride. It was not so often that my wife, Jenny, came out with me, but there she was, ahead of me by a few paces: her long legs gliding; her fists up before her chest, moving to the rhythm of her feet, and her ponytail, swinging back-and-forth, seemed to tease me in some sensual manner: such an odd sensation.

As we neared the point in the path where the foliage caped the vista; and points of light dappled the ground, I was able to distinguish a familiar sent - the smell of reefer. It did not seem that Jenny noticed my yielding pace, for she kept ahead; blind to my thread. The pungent whiff had sparked recollections of my first encounter with Jenny. It was a party, a new year's party, 1994, at a friend's apartment where we first met. I was sitting in the spacious balcony with friends: a small group of childhood buddies. We, of course, were discreetly passing a joint among ourselves, getting drunk with smoke, and cracking smiles with goofy, glazed eyes.

That's when Jenny, a neighbor in the building, sat near our circle as if to be noticed, so it seemed. I found her attractive right from the get-go; I also felt bad that she was sitting by herself. I thus invited her to sit with us and she accepted. I introduced her to my comrades with a slurred tongue. Jenny, so it seemed, recognized the happenings around her, yet she appeared and maintained a relaxed posture, demeanor. I looked around, then to my fellow smokers; and they, with adrift eyes, gave me the go-ahead. I looked cautiously at Jenny as I presented what remained of the cigarette. She smiled and, after looking around, accepted. Within minutes we were all talking garbage about what appeared to be, in that dense spell, the deeper things of life: hollow words, nonsense.

When the clock struck midnight, Jenny and I embraced (high from both the smokes and the campaign): the new year had arrived, as with a magnet attraction between us. Jenny wrote her number on the palm of my hand before kissing me goodbye. We rapidly discovered, after only a few dates, that a chemistry existed between us....