I can’t help it. My heart races and leaps. I am glitter and breeze and sunsets and clouds. I am stardust and radiation and Dark Matter and inexplicable time and the Big Bang. I have told my husband that this is normal. He will believe me one day. When we are ninety, or thereabouts.
This is who I fell in love with today:
He was a skinny thing, all elbows and reeds. A long neck. Sharp chin. Pale skin like milk. Thick black leg hairs standing straight out, as sure as tree trunks. He was wearing black gym shoes and black socks stretched to the middle of his bony calves, long shorts, and a tee- shirt with Phil Collins on it. He had a red white and blue sweat headband around his head and trucker-shaped sunglasses with white, plastic frames balancing on his long, straight nose and another pair of sunglasses on his head just in case. And he had a boom box. One of those ancient magnavox numbers with the double tape deck that I remember asking for Christmas the year I turned eleven.
(I didn’t get it, by the way. Thanks a lot, Santa.)
The boom box was turned all the way up. Peter Gabriel. Of course.
I was on my way to the library to get work done out of the chaos of my house, and I couldn’t stop. But I wanted to. He sat down on a low wall under a tree, his boom box balanced on his pale, bony knees. And I wanted to sit next to him and take his hands.
Here, I would say. This is your life line. And this is your head. And this is your heart. And my heart. And everyone’s heart.
Here. My fingers curling into his, my eyes bright, my lips curled into a smile. Skin and bone, breath and thought. The vastness of space. The beauty of the atom. Your perfect soul. My mind is inscrutable. It is burning and storming and wild. It is a cosmic wind, blowing from one end of the universe to the other, looping inside itself like a snake swallowing its tail, forever and ever and ever.
Here. My life and my love. I have known you before. I will know you again. Every moment happens simultaneously with every other moment, every life harmonizes with every other life. We are linked. We are song. We are the woven roots of the endless grass. And we are all one.
But I had work to do. The light turned green. I adjusted my backpack and headed into the library and left him behind in the shade. He didn’t notice me. He didn’t need to.
(Incidentally, I also fell madly in love with the elderly gentleman playing the Steinway in the workroom next to mine at the library. And now I have my eye on a broad shouldered woman cupping her hands around her eyes as she stands at the bus station. This happens a lot. I am large. I contain friggin multitudes.)
And now I shall pour that love into the work. It is not a bad thing. It bubbles and flows. It is a river. It is the rain. It is the swelling ocean. Who have you fallen in love with lately?
Kelly Barnhill 
This is a wonderfully sweet post. Your expression of your feelings rings a bell, many bells in fact. Rather than falling in love with someone, I concentrated today on loving dislikable coworkers so as to not let their ill feelings affect me negatively but to let those feelings grow the love from me.
My Quaker sister-in-law deals with that sometimes at Meetings. She says she creates boundaries around that person and loves them in that place. She says it helps.
The gypsy who stopped me backing my car out of a stall at Target to ask me for money. The way she pantomimed rolling down the car window, the way she casually said under her breath, “oh my, you’re gorgeous,” before she actually addressed me, the way she asked for money feed her starving family and yet had not the least bit of concern in her eyes (this was not begging to her, it was a financial transaction, as professional and as calculating as any lawyer demanding an advance), the way she totally surprised me with her dark skin, hair, and eyes, (her appearance practically screaming Latina) and yet spoke English like a native Californian, and the way she turned away, already searching for the next target, when I told her no.
My mind, otherwise unoccupied, spent the next several minutes while I drove home, building an elaborate fantasy of our life together, the gypsy lady and I. Then I got home, and kissed my wife and thanked my lucky stars I don’t have to date again, forever (if I’m lucky).
And then I wrote her up into a scene in my novel. One of the absolute joys of writing being I can fall madly in love with a woman or man, but don’t have to have an actual relationship with them. The best part being I don’t have to spend all that money on birthday presents, and Christmas gifts. Also Valentines day is a lot easier with only one person to shop for.
Seriously. I hitched my wagon to my one-and-only way back when I was twenty, so it has been quite a while since I last had to wade through the dating morass. What an excruciating process. Don’t miss it at all.
I was 35 when I met The Pretty Wife™, and there is no going back. I was single most of that time, the last few years feeling like being naked and drug/rolled along a floor of broken glass. If you got out at 20, I say you were lucky.
The up side is that dating when you’re older can be much less dramatic. I think there were three of my ex girlfriends at our wedding, and I still keep in contact with them. The Pretty Wife is friends with them as well, recognizing they are not a threat to her. When you’re over 30 its a lot easier to look at a person, and even after 2 weeks or even 2 months of the intense early stages of a relationship, realize its not going to last. You can even go on to “still being friends” and have that tired old saying actually mean something. They are women I love, but cannot live with, which makes my wife that much more valuable to me. She STILL puts up with me. Such a joy.
That being said, I wouldn’t wish being single again on you, or to even my worst enemy. May you go out together, holding hands and smiling, at a very old age.
This post was wonderful on its own but was made even more awesome by the photo of Lloyd Dobler. Because John Cusack makes pretty much everything better, in my opinion. (Except The Raven, which was a terrible, terrible movie despite his presence.) Today I fell in love with the woman who gave me a Swedish massage. She had a very faint southern accent and was cheery without being sickening, kind but not overly solicitous, and you could just tell that she was super comfortable in her own skin. I kind of wanted to hug her.
Lloyd Dobler is, was, and will always be my heart’s true soulmate. For real.
(And yes, good god. The Raven. My husband and I have a pact to never speak of that movie, and to wipe it from existence.)
And anyone who gives Swedish massages automatically puts themselves in a higher level of Awesome, right from the get-go.
And with this reply, so full of goodness and things that made me say YES, I think I may have just fallen in love with you as well.
*blows kisses*
A wandering eye that takes in everyone, with love.
Don’t lose it.
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