This…

Seven years have passed, and he still falls too fast.  It’s a joke between us now, but then, the words seemed so absurdly new to me that I was lightheaded and nauseous hours after seeing “I love you” glowing back at me from the boxy layout of my Yahoo! Mail.  It reads like an effortless exertion, a thoughtless act, a given, as if… of course… he loved me.  He’s still a master of the cliché and his relative youth at the time only amplifies that particular affliction, but I can still feel the a tingling shadow, once such clarity of feeling that after the first hit, I was bedridden for an hour.  Such utter drunken newness felt profoundly unreal, as if I had stumbled into a fiction that was sixteen years in the making.  I agonized over a response, reciprocation feeling like a contract even then, mere weeks after our first kiss.  Just as he still falls too fast, I still fall far too hard, the world “love” cementing eligible gents to my loyal heart like Gorilla Glue.  My reply, however, betrays none of this anguish, instead reading like a terrified treatise on teenage avoidance.  The Student Council, Pokemon and comic books are all reflected upon at length before the tiny afterthought of “I love you too” that closed the letter.  It looks so tiny wrapped in its camouflage of high school gossip and what I’d like for Christmas. All those words encoding my honesty, hiding the desperate plea, “Please, never stop this.  Never stop writing I love you at the end of your e-mails.  Never make me regret deciding to fall in love with you.  Please?”  I read my idiotic ramblings over and over as snow fell on pine trees and my brother strummed away on the guitar in the next room, the notes clashing with the Bing Crosby playing throughout the house.  The lump in my chest as I pressed ‘Send’ didn’t pass for hours, and lay in bed that night finding his face in my popcorn ceiling.

I want to ask if he knew, if he read between my awkward jokes and glimpsed my fearful ecstasy.  I want to know that he was as scared as I was when he wrote those words, just as afraid of time and drift and being alone.  Seven years have passed, and I still can’t express to him that raw brand of honesty, even knowing everything that came after that first “I love you.”  We both know that he still falls too fast, and I still fall too hard, but we also carry with us this curse of first love, the knowledge that we’re paralyzed, still begging each other silently from somewhere deep, deep inside, “Never stop. Please? Never stop.”

…inspired this…

There are plenty of things to hate about Los Angeles, to miss about Sedona, to miss about Oak Creek.  I didn’t get homesick very often when I was in college, surrounded by adventure and grime and fabulous restaurants where Thai Elvis crooned all the way through your tom ka gai.  But god, did I miss the stars.  Long nights staring at the sky to the whirr of a Diskman, playing “No Name Face” over and over again on tinny portable speakers.  We would freeze ourselves at three in the morning, wrapping our bodies in countless layers to keep the sharp canyon air out of our bones, but it would soak through anyway, turning conversations from love to bitch sessions about the goddamn cold.  I would strain my eyes in the wet air of city nights, desperately trying to see the tiny glowing dots whose absence seemed reduce this city to a sea of self absorption. Time and gas were cheap commodities then, and I would drive for hours on the lonely mountain roads sneaking their way through the city, staring out into the millions of lights that blanketed the city, the night sky having fallen to earth like countless shooting stars.