The last five days; tonight they finished with us going to a book reading, a poetry reading and a concert. She: a young and published author, up-and-coming, a book with her words in it for sale on the table that night, who knew the performers who in turn knew her. First name basis.
The last fives days: We met and left each other at a bus terminal: where people who live in places too insignificant for airplanes to land or who are too poor to afford to fly or are who too eccentric to do otherwise go to depart.
It was the first time she'd seen my son. It was the first time I'd seen her since I missed her wedding.
She said our lives were parallel. What she was doing, what I was doing: the same reasons, the same motions. We suspend our lives, this poetry, momentarily in the presence of the other: I hardly hacked, and she hardly wrote. In its place we stopped to live mundanely in the others' presence. She left a sink of clean dishes and a man re-smitten. Every time. Every time.
We do this yearly, or sometimes more, as is our ritual. And when we part, she mouths back over her shoulder once out of earshot: "I love you."
She knows my answer.
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5 comments:
Dammit, Aaron! Here I was thinking you haven't posted anything in a week (and I haven't seen you online either) because you were working on something cool. And I come in to see this garbage?
...I don't know you anymore... ;)
I preferred the elephant posts.
Heh, just wrote a long letter a couple weeks back about "balancing seeking with being comfortable with the mundane" with love as one of the few things that straddles the paradox.
The first was "learning to be comfortable with the mundane", which I pretty quickly wrote off as not particularly interesting, but I must say that I didn't give it a fair shake. [...]
The majority of the things [accomplishments] enumerated above at this point falls into the mundane category at this point. There's kind of a "been there, done that" air about them. But on the other hand they are things that I take great comfort in and in many ways they're tied up with who I am today; externally at least.
Love I think is one of the few things that transcends most of the previous categories and is at once fundamentally accepting, renewable -- both a path and a destination -- and even, maybe even fundamentally, mundane. [...]The mundane is often discounted -- not really given its due. But seeking after goals is tiresome; moreso if you happen to be disposed to reaching them. To quote Hobbes:
"Felicity consisteth in prospering, not in having prospered."We all too often get lost in a cycle of looking for fulfillment in having prospered when in fact there's little there to be had. It's the process that drives us, not the ends. Love actually offers both and is possibly unique in that; the simplicity and comfort of the mundane with the challenge of perserverance. Taking a break for such tends to, well, remind us that we're human.
And well, it never hurts to get laid either. ;-)
Hey great blog, if you have a change do you think you could view my friends site?
Sexy Letters
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