The day I fell in love

My days are pregnant, bursting with promise. I am in a new city, a new country, I am free of waiting for punch card hours to be full, I am free of friends, family, television. Free to do anything, everything. Yet I choose not to give birth to new beginnings. I squander my days, let them pass without labor or love. I relish my time spent sitting, indoors, in languor. I relish, but it presses me.

Potential known is a great enemy. It stifles the natural urges, the sparks, the playing at creativity. I am in a foreign country, I should revel in its newness, the experiences it affords me. Only it affords me nothing. I feel the compunction, and fret. I forget that my lethargy, my disgust, my contempt, my discontent: these are what brought me here. I came to shatter my social mores. I came to escape the voice in my head which I confused too easily with that of loved ones.

I am here in hiding. I am here in voluntary exile to find reprieve from that cacophony of routines (living today like yesterday: this is my life) and to assuage the scared permutations of myself.

To walk streets in silence, not be known, to weed myself, pluck from me the blooms whose times have come and to plant the seeds that will bear me tomorrow. I must gag myself, destroy ho-hum harmony, and roar within. Make my hollows known and let loose the echo that will shake the world.

The pretty girls on the streets are perfect. They pass me and I think: I could be forever with this girl.

I sit in the train and across me is a girl with severe beauty. Her hair dyed blond. There is a darkness and sadness in her eyes. I see them looking coldly from fields of black.

I am in the library and there is a girl with curly hair sitting at the table next to mine. She is filling out a form. She has on a fifties retro pink skirt. I could not even see her face, but she struck me. Such arrested beauty in a world of postmarked meanings. Aesthetics appeal to me—cannot beauty be a guide line? “That which is most beautiful is right.” I have often been seduced by its simplicity. Yet I resist: there is dangerous emptiness down that path.

The girls, they are paintings to me: perfect not for who they are but for how, after only a second, a flash in the corner of my eye, I can see them as wholes. I can see their lives, their pasts and futures. They have their sadnesses and joys, their secrets most precious, habits and flaws... They are poems of people, snapshots—untrue and false like only art can be—yet perfect and balanced and beautiful.

I have always lived by great bodies of water. Is this uncommon? My first experience of thereness was on the shore of Lake Superior. This was the horizon, where the earth bled into the sky, a place that can be seen but never reached.

I stood on a street corner. It was at that moment, as I watched the faces pass me, that I fell in love with Copenhagen. I watched and watched and, for once, I didn’t feel like I was imposing, invading the souls that passed. I had no voice. I had no desire. I grinned stupid. I grinned widely aware of my stained yellow teeth, of my unshaven face. I didn’t matter: I was in love.

The wind changed, the sky was suddenly dark with clouds. I shivered. My arms were covered with goosebumps. And I grinned, wider than ever before.

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