Falling in love

You look across the table at someone; you see something in the other person’s eyes that is at the same time strange and warmly familiar. You recognize in each other a family member, a kindred spirit. You have always been together, somehow, you know this, and you feel as if you have always known it. Yet, yesterday you were strangers, alone in the world and lonely, longing for love and joy and laughter. In the gap between yesterday and today is a profound mystery, the realization that one small difference in your daily routines would mean that you would never have met. If you hadn’t come to that party, if I hadn’t decided to go to that dorm social, if you had left school five minutes earlier I would never have run into you and we might never have started talking. And now, we are together and nothing in our lives will ever be the same. We are the same, and we are changed. I am yours. You are mine. We are for each other.
You are the planet I orbit. I am a moon, a small white satellite, my face turned perpetually toward you. Without you I am cold, aimless, lost. You give me shelter, light, grace, love. You feed me. I worship you. I want to throw away everything else just to be near you. I can’t get enough of your eyes, your lips, your vanilla hair. I want to drink you, eat you, wear you like a coat. I want you to keep me inside you always, so that I can see what you see and hear what you hear and go where you go. I cannot sleep without seeing your lovely face. I cannot rise in the morning without hearing your laughter. I wait for you, I watch for you, I pine and pace and fidget. I am useless, incapable of action, unmade, untethered. I am sick. I am robust. I am alive. I am sane, at last.
I could gaze into your eyes forever. When I look at you I see myself, the way you see me, and I feel jubilant. You see me. You want me. How did I live before you noticed me? Where were you? How did I manage not to notice you? Was I even awake?
We share a secret, the story of us. It is only ours, no one else can know it. We can tell the details of our meeting, of how you asked me to be yours alone, of how we kissed for the first time, of the time we first said “I love you.” But no one else can come inside the circle of our love, it is our universe alone. We walk, we sleep, we work, we play in the real world, but we dwell in our own private place, together and separate. We are fogged in but not stuck, sidetracked but not lost, adrift but not at sea, bewildered but not confused. We are perfectly matched, aligned, united. We understand. We know. What is inscrutable to everyone else is perfectly clear to us. We are a category unto ourselves.
Nothing more needs to be said. We communicate with a glance. We speak with a smile. Our love needs no words.

August afternoon

Jane sat in her back yard, her laptop plugged into an extension cord that stretched across the patio and lawn. Don put the cord there for her after she told him that she intended to write outside today. She told herself that she would write at least 500 words, a blog entry anyway, but so far no inspiration came. Insipid sentences spooled out beneath her fingers: “It is so hard to wait,” “My daughter is getting ready to go to work,” “I was walking Mookie the other day and…” She remembered what one of her teachers had said, back in grad school. “If it bores you, don’t put it out there.” Denis had been talking about how to conduct oneself in I group, but it seemed appropriate for writing also. Everything bored her today. She felt restless, ineffective, uninteresting. Why would anyone want to read what she wrote?
Distracted, she looked around her. Her suburban back yard, half shaded and half sunny at this mid-afternoon hour, was bordered on one side by a stone patio and on the other side by shrubs and irises. The iris blossoms, bone-gray and withered, were long past their prime. Someone should prune those, she thought. One end of the yard was fenced and the other had a rose hedge that Don had planted seven years ago, most of which received too little sun to thrive. Against the fence grew rosemary and lavender and three sweet pepper plants, one of them bearing a few fruits, the other two having reached a foot high and stopped there, as if the soil were only fertile enough for one plant. Mookie lay sleeping under Jane’s chair, having finished his afternoon squirrel chase and perimeter patrol, his soft coat cozy next to her bare feet. A breeze stirred the maple branches in the neighbor’s yard. Jane put on her sweater. The wind died. She took the sweater off again.
Passion, that’s what she needed. To care enough about something to live it, really inhabit it, and then watch it take shape in pixels on her computer screen. If she could just feel passionately about something, the writing would be easy, wouldn’t it?, she wondered. Her children had it. Samantha was 21, partway through college and working in a little art gallery on Queen Anne. She had a new boyfriend and they spent all their spare time together. John was 17, and about to enter his senior year in high school. He too had a new boyfriend, a sweet young man who had just graduated from high school and who had spent the past months showering John with affection and attention. Jane heard the way her children laughed when they talked with their lovers on the phone, saw the way they paced the front hall waiting for them to arrive, smelled the extra cologne they doused themselves with, noticed the gleam in their eyes and the flush on their cheeks when they came in from a date. She remembered the way it felt to be newly in love, and she wondered how to capture that feeling again, here in her menopausal middle age.
It was not that she wanted a new lover, no, she did not want that sort of complication. She and Don would celebrate 28 years of marriage in a few days. Their marriage was comfortable, familiar, friendly, but hardly ever passionate, even when they fought. She didn’t want to risk that for a little mid-life romance. No, what she needed was a legitimate cause, something to focus her energies on. Her children no longer needed her, and her career was on hiatus since she had finished grad school and left her fulltime job. She could do more volunteer work at church. She could start trying to market herself as a consultant and coach. She could stop playing at writing and get something finished and published. She could train for a marathon instead of just running a few miles a day. She could take up one of her many hobbies and perfect it. Yet each time she threw herself into one of these ideas, her enthusiasm waned after a few weeks and she would find herself bored, listless, at wit’s end.

Adapting

Darwin said that the creatures that evolved most successfully were not the strongest or the most intelligent but the ones that adapted best to change. This is what I am about, now.

I'm adapting to my son's absence. He is on an extended journey, and I am childless and unhappy about it. I miss his energy, his strength. I miss the raw teenage pheromones that jangle his nerves and disturb the somnolence of our home. I thought it would be peaceful not to have him here but it's just boring. I'm finding it hard to finish things. I've started so many projects...they are not done yet. I count the days until he returns. I log onto his MySpace account just to see if he's logged on and whether any of his friends have posted comments. I write him letters. He has called, and I love the sound of his voice but it makes me miss him even more when we hang up.

I'm adapting to my retirement. I have no daily activities that I have to do, few commitments that I must meet. I am free to do what I want. What do I want?

I'm adapting to my aging body. I am middle aged. Inside, I am a teenager with nerves as raw as my son's frayed jeans. I am passionately in love for the first time. I can think about nothing but the object of my passion. I am giddy and helpless. Then I remember, no, that's not me, that's who I was. Now I'm a sober old married lady. I'm not 17. My son is.

I wish for the feeling of that first love, the passion that consumes your every waking moment and even invades your dreams. I want to care so deeply about something that I can think of nothing else. Does that pass away with the years? Did I ever care deeply? Will I ever again?

I sigh. I breathe. I wait. I adapt.