19 :

I tried not to fall in love. I tried to be strong, aloof, an island, wary of being hurt. But I wasn’t succeeding. I fell in love, despite myself. And then I tried not to let it show.

A studied trickle of text messages, a hint of suggestive comments had grown into something else. Time had unfolded her name, her age, the fact that I was sat next to her that night. And, time had lead simply to a suggestion. A way to meet.

I debated various options. Where should I take her? A swanky restaurant? Or shall I send her to a rural pub for a down-to-earth meal? A sports theme bar near the industrial area? All you can eat Chinese buffet for a gritty moment of low-flying poverty tourism?

What message was I sending out? What message did I want to convey? Keen, but not desperate? That was the one for me.

I was wary. I’d been fucked by love. We all have been at one time of another. I wasn’t planning on being in love again. No way. Before one can love again, one must no longer hurt from the love before. At some point, sometime, in some vague, possible future, maybe I was planning on meeting someone, sometime, if things work out well, seeing what happens from there. I wasn’t planning on being a monk forever. And she wasn’t even my girlfriend yet. Just someone I wanted to know better.

She ate Spaghetti Napolitiana with parmesan cheese and a sprinkling of black pepper. Avoided the Garlic bread, but had Ciabatta with cheese. I read great significance into the absence of Garlic Bread. I don’t quite know why. But I do. But I didn’t want to admit to that.

Dammit, stop thinking. The world is not an experiment to be analysed. Don’t think too much.

I noticed she didn’t eat food. She seduced it. And she didn’t splash any on her metallic blue shirt, the top two buttons undone, the pale flesh of a soft neck. No, not shirt, a blouse. Like the French, items were sexualised. Blouse with soft, inviting vowels for le femme, Shirt (with all its hard consonants) for Le Bloke. The softness of her skin.

You can tell a lot about someone by their fingers. This is one of the reasons that summer is the most beautiful season. I can look at a woman’s fingers – if they are immaculately groomed, bitten, or nicotine stained with years of tension – and immediately I learn something about what makes them tick. It’s a sign beyond the simple raw materials, that of hair, clothing, and stance that may be conditioned by employment or other outside factors. A woman’s fingers never lie. Raw bitten fingers show that underneath everything else, someone is worried about something. Something is eating them inside.

Summer is good also for feet. I am able to look at open shoes and with merely a glance, I can read them. Sometimes what they do not say speaks louder than all the words in the world. If the finger and toenails are the same colour varnish, you can be fairly sure that underneath all things there is some insecurity – or at the very least a consciousness of the self-image being projected. If they are different colours, or different coloured nails on each digit, we are dealing with someone who is either selfconsciously weird or just plain unco-ordinated. Or lazy.

Sloth and lust are sins.

But just toenails? It probably means a woman who isn’t really that bothered. It might be that they are using what’s left in the bathroom cabinet, or stolen a friends for a moment. It might be they got bored.. It might mean they like to show their sexuality quietly, to show that they have the power to lure, but discreetly, almost as if you wouldn’t know. A subtle seduction. Or it might be they know strangers are sat next to them and looking down. There are plenty of attractive young women here, like anywhere, if you know where to look. The lure comes in all forms. We are all programmed to respond to signals. The angle of eyes in the face. The crook of a smile. How she walks into the room. Sometimes true love is forged in the eyes. The purity of the soul. It’s in the blood.

I’m programmed to think this way. We do not make errors : we execute erroneous programmes. God is a poor coder.

My eyes moved over her body as if I was admiring a work of art. I looked at her and I thought, yes, I could love this woman. Or a rough, physical approximation of it.

Her hair looked amazing. I tried to look beyond that. I tried not to let it influence me. Our conversation was deeper this time. Deeper than text messages and flirtatious emails. It was not spiritual. But it wasn’t the kind of desperate fumbling conversation that the unsuited have. More a type of union, a meeting of similar souls, an alignment even. Like the stars before the eclipse.

We were not fumbling for some kind of love. We were falling. Like it was the easiest thing in the world. Like I had met a long lost friend. Like I was coming back home.

As she spoke I watched her lips. I imagined them dong things unprintable in a family newspaper. Wrapped around my cock at bedtime. She spoke with the tongue of angels. I tired not to feel lust. All men are weak. I had no choice.

In the rhythm of her voice, the bad things in the world ceased to exist. It was beautiful. A cloud of infatuated ignorance descended. I suddenly started to believe that songs by the Carpenters are not the deluded fiction of the naïve, but the hymns of the priviledged. That whenever she was near that the sky filled with birds.

If I ever had it in the first, the plot was rapidly being lost.

Conversation ran from the mundane to the soulsearching. From the trivia that men fill their brains with to hide from emotions, to an indepth dissection of the nature of life and what it all means. We didn’t know what it meant, but we knew what life could be. Beautiful again.

We were trying to build a connection. Those desperate pauses, those seconds of building something. But what? A regret? Or a new future? Except we weren’t trying. The connection was made without even trying. As if it came from nowhere. As if it was always waiting to be made, and then finally, it happened.

I had her phone number. And her email. And maybe the path to a better life. And we kissed as the evening drew to a close, in a windy alcove on a train station, as I waited for her train home, and I prayed that every second, every minute, every time I saw her, wasn’t my last, but the first of many more. And in that moment of kissing, as our lips met and our souls leaped into each other, I knew that at this, us, was not forever, that at some time we would be apart, victims of age, or cancer, or the dull embers of separation. But even though we know that, from the moment we start to live we start to die, that from the moment we start to love we start to feel alive, and that as we start to live we also live with the knowledge that nothing, not even love is forever.

When you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start right now.

I thought, I hoped, I knew I could trust again. I was scared of love. As anyone would had been hurt would know. But I believed that someone, somewhere could cure me of that. Like the title of a bad Hollywood movie, she could be the one.

I sleep like a baby now. A baby that has finally conquered pissing its pants in the middle of the night and waking with a soft helpless cry. Never before have I craved oblivion and absence so much. Never before have I found it come so easy.

Of course, the one time when I actually felt happy, at more alive than I ever have, I promptly fell unconsciousness.