When You Fall In Love With The Idea Of Them

I fell in love with the idea of dinner for two. Two chairs. Two plates. Two glasses clinking together. Two people meeting at one time, to celebrate two things. Each other.

I fell in love with the idea of movies in bed. The curtains would be pulled shut so we couldn’t tell if it was night or day. The bed would be loaded with blankets, and the Christmas lights would be lit up around my room, even though it is summer. The sound of laughter fills the room, as we chose a Korean horror flick and it doesn’t match up to the 7.5 stars iMDb said it had.

I fell in love with the idea of pitching a tent underneath the stars, somewhere on the coast, along Highway 1. Big Sur perhaps, where it’s mostly cold, so you bundle up late at night around the fire and stay close together. We would bring a portable speaker and play something that lulled us to sleep, or at least complimented our drunken happiness. Maybe Death Cab For Cutie, or Frank Sinatra. Or anything in between.

I fell in love with the idea of catching a flight to a foreign place. We would struggle to learn the language together and fumble around our words until we found the right cafe. We would explore new and exciting destinations, capturing our favorite on camera, and perhaps drawing a quick sketch before catching the next bus to a different destination. You would hold my hand when the plane took off, since you know I have adeepfear of flying. You would feed me alcohol until I fell asleep, just as I had asked you to do.

I fell in love with the idea of talking until 4 am about aliens and ghosts and what comes after death, and what does it mean to be here and everything that remains unanswered in our world. We would talk until nothing made sense anymore, and I could tell you were falling asleep because you would start to trail off about things that weren’t related to what we were talking about. I would hold you close and lay awake as you slept, thinking how lovely this was.

I fell in love with the idea of you calling me at 2 am because you can’t sleep, and neither could I. Why would we go to sleep without having made up? What were we even fighting about? My world isn’t complete without you, why would I ever risk that for one second? I would drive over, and we would be as if nothing even happened at all, since the most important part was that we had each other at all in the first place.

I fell in love with the idea of a road trip across the country together. We don’t know what hotels we will stay in across the way, but we don’t care. We keep track of all the McDonald’s we see, because they seem to be taking over the world. We play every CD in your car three times over because mid way we lose reception in the desert. We pull into a dirty motel room and laugh at how naive we are for thinking we could do this without a plan. We make it safely, anyways.

I fell in love with the idea of someone who also fell in love with ideas. The idea of receiving complete fulfillment from doing the smallest of activities together, just because we were doing them together. So what we aren’t super­models, or famous, or extremely well off, but what we are is everything to someone, and that someone is you, and that other someone is me.

I fell in love with the idea of us before ever even falling in love with you.