Why I Fall In Love In Ten Seconds
By Anonymous
Last night, I saw the love of my life. She was sitting across the smoky patio in a softball uniform. Short blonde hair, not unlike a ‘60s bob. A skeletal frame drowned in green and grey polyester. A smile of slightly slanted teeth; imperfection uniquely rendered. Grazed by dirt and the cheer of team spirit, she infectiously grinned, intermittently glancing over at me with narrow eyes sucking me in like quicksand.
I pictured our life together. Taking her hand and tugging her to the nearest park to make-out on the see-saw. Discovering mutual phobias like our harrowing fear of neck wrinkles. Selecting matching patterned cases for our decrepit and brutally stained pillows we got from my parent’s storage space. Prophesying what we’d look like at eighty years old on a rickety, feebly swinging bench in the country. Death, and our cruelly, sarcastic gravestone etchings: “A little privacy please. I’m decomposing here.”
Images flipped like a Rolodex in my mind all within ten seconds. A sixth of a minute and I fell in love. Charting our love story, our pain, our partnership that withstood the emotional rogue waves that crushed us momentarily at various stages in our lives.
By now, you can presumably gather that I’m the quintessential Emo kid. As much as it pains me to say, I still listen to Dashboard Confessional and feel my stomach tightening as “Remember to Breathe” depressingly falters in the air. I blame Chris Carrabba’s saccharine vocals for a lot in my life, but I don’t believe it was an accident that I identified with those excessively romantic (or as douche bags say, ‘pussy’) themes.
I love love. I love it in the same way that I love any dream. It is pure idealism. It is like communism without people screwing it up. It is the same as dreaming of winning the lottery and every single thing you’d buy, and every thing you would give up (i.e. frozen dinners of any kind).
In ten seconds, I can see a girl and dream the entire story of us. Our fingers touching as we reach in simultaneously for popcorn. Our inside jokes that we utterly hang onto as our own. Our fiery stare deadlocked as I penetrate her, pursuing an eternal answer that I know I’ll never find, while being sublimely content to desperately search for it within her for the rest of my life.
The next time you see a guy on the street or in the subway or in the cereal aisle, it could be me nervously glancing over at you and falling in love. Leaning back and taking in our life story as it passes by in seconds. It’s beautiful.