Every day I fall madly in love with someone.

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?

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: cosmology, Dark Matter, Love story