| this is some sort of love letter |
[Sep. 23rd, 2008|07:45 pm]
c.
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Traditionally, spring is the season of love – maybe it's the blooming flowers breaking bright through the bleary winter or maybe as the temperature rises, icy hearts thaw along with our tarmac driveways. Whatever the cause, I have seen enough television shows and movies to know that even the most cynical of us can catch spring fever. But I am not like everybody else and cannot recall ever catching the common cold of spring that is falling in lust. While I swoon at flowers and shed my heavy winter jackets with relief, I have successfully avoided the Lovebug during his most popular season for all the years I can remember.
He catches me when it’s least suspected, in autumn when the leaves die in the prettiest way. After harshly reflected green and burning heat all summer, I’m one of the first to welcome the fall with its smell of pumpkin pie and cool wind wrapping itself all around me. As someone who has been cold her entire life, fall is a comfortable season – lightly bundled in thin jackets and sneakers, stepping through crunchy leaves and breathing in newly sharpened pencils and fresh from the store textbooks. But even then, I fall in love with life, not boys as it’s supposed to be. Autumn is my season, not Love’s – I don’t moon over romantics until the temperature dips to shivering cold levels in December.
Winter keeps me huddled under blankets, gripping a mug of hot chocolate, unwilling to crawl into the day for fear of freezing. In times like that, I imagine warm arms to keep me safe from the harsh wind I picture outside my windows. Pulling myself through the dirty Jersey snow with cold, empty hands has always been one of my biggest struggles. Winter is when I feel the need to fall in love, and quick, unless my blood freezes right there in my veins.
And in all truth, I fell for you not as we spent hot summer nights in your basement, but in the chilly, fluorescent-lit grocery store in early January as we wished for snow. My skin, frozen from years of keeping it away from the natural heat source of others’ bodies, thawed at your accidental touch. I can pin down the exact moment the Lovebug, who has never effectively infected me until this year, jumped from your hands to mine (and I’m sure you can, too). It was January in the baby food aisle and being blasted from freezers on two ends, it was the only time I have purposely slowed my work to make a moment last longer – and the bite came sometime between opening large cardboard boxes and filling shelves with disgusting full-meal purees for toothless infants.
I infamously cannot stay focused on one thing long enough to appreciate it fully. Instead I fall into quick and dirty obsessions, the kind that consume all of me but burn off just as hot as they started after only a few weeks. This goes for food, movies, books and boys alike. But here I am, more than six months past that frozen day at work and my heart still flutters like a first grader at your touch.
As my favorite season descends on me with its fiery colors, I’m falling in love with life again. My stomach butterflies are motionless as your hands are two hundred miles up the coast and my arms cannot stretch that far. Your voice, though, falls over me like the leaves soon will all over campus and I spend most of my time translating words into feelings instead of, as I’m used to, the other way around. And in just a few more months, I’ll cuddle up to you under heavy blankets, trying to protect my newly vulnerable body and fall in love again every day. |
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