A Fountain of Youth

I say otherwise, but I am really a huge hypocrite. The part of town where I live is swarming with college aged kids, adjacent as it is to a large university. I'm appropriately snarky and condescending when in their company, but always when their backs are turned. The loft apartments where I live with my wife are a revolving door of the young and perpetually reckless. It's a drafty building with huge, vaulted ceilings, once literally a sausage factory.

The smell of marijuana periodically wafts into my own unit. Even though I did the same thing at their age, I have now become a reformed pothead. I don't care if they do it, really, but I no longer want to live in a place that perpetually smells like a frat house. I accepted adulthood quite easily and willingly, so should they.

A serious child who became a serious teenager, I kept waiting for my contemporaries to grow up. When they finally did, I fought the temptation to ask them what the hell took so long. I was socially irresponsible in my own way, but I was always careful to disguise my actions and leave no marks behind.

Here's the real problem. My wife asks me all the time if I'm satisfied with her. I keep answering in the affirmative, but now, on the verge of fifty, she asks more and more. I think she's really asking the question of herself more than me. She's been fighting a steady, but predictable war by way of hair dye and tweezers.

I know it's different for women, but I kind of like the grey. It plays in to one aspect of a complicated fantasy life. My first infatuations, sexually and romantically, were directed at the adults who played an active role in my life. By this I mean my teachers, as well as my mother's endless parade of friends and acquaintances. I was much less interested in the kids my own age.

But that's just one piece of the puzzle. I find I now lust nearly as much for the girls on the corner, often wearing the shortest of shorts, now that spring is giving way to summer. While I find their side conversations silly and embarrassing, I always listen with more attention than I let on.

For my ego, I'd love to have a relationship with a truly beautiful woman just once. I made my bed, and I'm usually quite happy with the decisions I've made (and the woman with whom I have chosen to share my life), but still I long for something I know I can't have. How typical.

My wife has a keen, intelligent mind. It's one of her best qualities and was one of the reasons I married her. But she's was never going to be confused for a knock-out and certainly isn't now. I keep hoping that I'll stumble across some solution that will benefit us both. She wants to be young, and I've sought a fix for a long time, maybe one that might even benefit us equally.

And one day, there it was. Or, at least, there was an option available to us. No angels came from heaven to grace me with a miracle. I stumbled across no secret potions or magical spells. I read no books. Hard as it is to believe, I learned how to do it all, step by step, in a dream. Waking up, hastily I jotted down the steps on the back of an old envelope, in sequential order, before I forgot everything.

It's a matter of directing fields of energy by way of mental exertion. I now knew how, but I was nowhere near a satisfying conclusion for the two of us.

There was no guarantee my wife was going to sign on to this audacious plan. I could have been a real asshole about this arrangement and put it in place without her even knowing it, but that wouldn't have right or fair.

Best for her to know. If she wanted youth, I could provide it. However, there were some major strings attached. I didn't make the rules, and as a result I've had quite a decision to make. We both have.

Transforming my wife into her eighteen-year-old self is at least cosmetically pleasing for the two of us, but here's the crucial caveat. We'll have to accept that, in addition to her physical appearance, she'll be intellectually and emotionally eighteen as well. I can't make her look like a fashion model, as much as I might desperately want it for my own selfish reasons.

She'll look identical in every way to how she did a little over thirty years ago. And, for the most part, she'll act and talk like it, too. In making my decision, I've looked through dusty old photo albums for hours. Getting some semblance of the form which she might soon take became something of an obsession.

This scenario is, I must concede, not entirely new to me. I fantasized about the same thing with a past partner, a much older woman. I met her years before I got married and settled down. She kept a picture of her college-aged self on the refrigerator, and I snuck many secret glances at it when she wasn't looking.

The situation in which I find myself now is a little different. I'm not a late twenties boy toy for hire anymore. Now in my late forties, I'm still a little too young for a trophy wife. I keep hoping that, should we go through it, my wife will surprise me, that she'll be an old soul after the procedure, oozing with unexpected maturity, not giggly and naive. But this may not be the case.

My wife took to the idea almost immediately, with a ferocity and eagerness that scared me a little. This is far from a panacea, I emphasize, but it proves precisely how much some women want to be young and stay young. What concerns me most is this-my wife has told me on multiple occasions how thoroughly she was intimidated by men at that age.

I may have to work very hard at building trust and soothing away insecurities. I'm not sure how the balance between younger and older will sort out in reality. No wonder fantasies are so appealing. They are perfect in every way, with no complications.

This isn't even the half of it. The two of us are going to have to weave an intricate system of lies and half-truths to make this even work. We've discussed fabricating divorce plans, leaving me a free agent. The older-looking version of herself, as the story will go, has conveniently left town in a huff, never to return. If only it was that simple.

She'll still basically look the same. And if we even pull this off, my male friends are going to give me shit for robbing the cradle, and some of my female friends are going to make their displeasure known loudly and prominently. I'd try to explain, but no one will believe me.

My wife is itching to do it. I keep telling her, over and over, that there will be many risks involved. I'm not sure we can undo the process, should it not work. I've asked her if starting all over again, learning hard life lessons once more, being hurt, making foolish mistakes-are these what she wants, really? She energetically indicates yes, do it.

Following all of the commands I learned in the dream, I begin the process. Before my eyes, I notice how her skin tightens and gains elasticity, her hair is now dark brown everywhere, and no crow's feet remaining. No one would doubt that she surely looks youthful now.

But here's the drawback. She now has an eighteen-year-old's understanding of what just happened, an eighteen-year-old's comprehension of a very complex arrangement, and the speech patterns and verbal tics that go along with it. In the meantime, I've turned into a total man, in spite of myself, and am wondering what it will be like to take her to bed.

Two fantasies have converged. The challenge has just begun. But before we entertain anything more serious, I have one central passion in mind. And apparently, so does she. I hope this works.