2013-02-19 - 1:24 p.m.
What's snake-in-the-grass true is that every time I see her, I want to kiss her and take her clothes off and press my warm body against hers and do things to her. It happens automatically. It's surefire, unavoidable, plain as hunger. She smiles, her arms stretch wide for a hug, and then we're hugging, curves within curves, arches on arches, and I remember how she felt, how we felt, how she smelled, how we laughed until snorting.
How many times have humans done this? Many times, an uncountable number of times, but just because it's an old feeling doesn't make it any less real and so that's how I felt when I saw this girl, in a city that was not mine but which was hers. It's always been this way, like during my last year of college when I handed her that letter as she studied in the first floor of the library. It was that way when we were together, in every way you can be together, years ago, too young, all nerve-endings, all heart, no head. At the diner in College Park, when she'd rented the red Mustang, and at the house party in Northeast DC, when we kissed until we panted. It was that way on Sunday, at that barbecue restaurant, on 25th and Broadway.
Of course, by now, there's no reason to believe it will ever stop. A friend said once that he never stops loving the girls he once loved, and I've finally come to know that he was right. On Sunday, she sat next to me, close enough to feel the heat of her thigh, talking about her husband's band, and it could have been her attic bedroom on Frederick Road, and we were naked, and she was smoking my cigarettes. On Sunday, she said how beautiful and warm and full of laughter was our first night, naked and red-orange in the candlelight. And then how bad our last was, broken up and reaching for something that was gone.
And I still loved her, even as she unloaded all the dark things she'd been meaning to say but never had. Her second glass of sangria flushing her, rounding out that big smile, she said she was sorry she'd been mean to me when we were together but how she'd never really believed she'd done anything of the sort. How blown-apart she'd been when I never moved to New York with her, how she'd called me at that office job downtown that February, to tell me we shouldn't see each other, so that she could pack her boxes without crying. How sleeping with my friend was a way to fill up the awful loneliness. I didn't cry, but she's always been good at noticing, and she must have noticed my lip trembling. And I don't cry. I never cry, unless it's the bottom of the ninth and it's a two-run home run and everyone is jumping, when every particle of the universe is also a part of me, when I want to make love to the brick walls still warm from the afternoon sun. But fuck, man. I almost cried.
And, yet. On the drive home, barreling down dark and cold Sixth Avenue toward the dark and cold Lincoln Tunnel, all I could do was think of her. Because the thing about love is that it is a potion, immune to and apart from reason, a thing that is bigger, or softer, or warmer, or more unknowable, or more magical, or sadder, than the sum of its parts. It is a toothy grin. It is the feeling of a palm on the curve between the ribcage and the hip. It is an old nickname, spoken, and also the giggle that comes right after the nickname. It is a bitch. It is a boot on the neck. It is the feeling of being unable to fall asleep until the sun's almost up. It is a warm shower, a breathing reason to get up. It is an electric forever.
