06.08.17

I Can Fall in Love for Twenty Seconds

            I can fall in love for twenty seconds. No, not what they call true love, but a different kind. A fantasy kind. It’s like the twenty seconds it takes for a waiter to bring you your food, when you spot it and say “Oh my, it’s coming!” from across the room. You watch that plate for the entirety of those twenty seconds. Your mouth starts to salivate, your lips move side to side in anticipation. You can picture how it’ll look once it’s right in front of you. You can feel its texture as it passes between your lips. You can taste the tang, the sweetness, the spice. You have an entire fantasy relationship with your meal before it’s even placed in front of you. And sometimes, the waiter walks straight on by and hands your most precious thing to someone else. Whoops, not yours! But still, in those twenty seconds, love and infatuation in its purest form has endured.

            I can fall in love for twenty seconds on a park bench, when someone catches my eye. Maybe it was the determination in their jawline, or the way the blues and yellows on their shirt dance with their skin tone in perfect harmony. Either way, I’m in. I look at this person’s eyes, their hands, their untied shoelace, and in the first ten seconds I feel as though I really know them. In the second ten comes the fun. The first laugh, embrace, kiss. I’m standing there beside them, my hand firmly intertwined with theirs and suddenly we’re on a ferris wheel and I’m wearing a yellow dress, our fabrics and skin tones performing one tremendous rhapsody, and then an ice cream filled spoon approaches my lips and we’re on a beach with sand in in our toes, and I look up and see just two perfectly luminescent clouds in the sky, and then I see thousands because we are 32,000 feet off the ground on a plane to Paris, yes, the lovely Paris, where we will wear our finest evening attire and I will wear my red lipstick and we will dance all night to jazz until it’s time for our petit dejeuner. I look down at my croissant then up and blink and they are far past my bench, almost out of sight, and my toes tap the pavement with excitement and my upturned mouth corners and crinkled eyes say, “You are the most incredible person I have ever known. Goodbye!” and they fade into a crowd, gone forever, and I think, Wow. What a time.

            I can fall in love for twenty seconds 1,000 times with one person in a night. Sometimes the laugh, the embrace, the kiss are real. They may say to me, “You are beautiful. You are dangerous” and my veins fill with fervor and ecstasy, and we fly from the corner of a room to the lush edge of a cliff in Ireland, and my white skirt whirls and frolics until it becomes the silk sheets of a bed in Berlin, where sparkling water and tears are all one in the same because sadness does not exist, and the wetness on our bodies sparkles too, under a waterfall in Chiang Mai, where I slap away a mosquito that is trying to give me a kiss because no, I only want kisses from this person, my person, who has given me all the happiness and life that the universe has to offer, here in this corner, where I blink and laugh and if they’re still in front of me, I dive back in again and I love them for another twenty seconds, perhaps twice or 999 times. And after that night, I may not see them until three weeks later, when I smile and think, Oh, there’s that person I spent a whole lifetime together with once.

Love, in its purest form.