The Best Part About Chasing The Girl Who You Don’t Understand

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The chase makes sense to you, you, and no-one else. Others you know, that know you, question your grasp on rational action, your ability to decipher lust from love, your inability to give when the unanswered stream of texts suggests surrender; but you say screw it, and not out of a reckless abandon. No, you’ve tapped into some unexpected and foreign strain of madness.

Every time you and her come together, no matter the duration of time shared, you smile with a wide-eyed grin, a sunny disposition, and walk bold as if a fire-a mad fearless fire-roars on the soles of your shoes.

Your friends mistake the change in your mannerisms as no more than a phase-an inevitable happiness with a job that provides financial security; but no, no, that wasn’t going to cut it, you’re on something else. A drug old as the original the painful cheesy opening of a romance novel; a drug we, or someone, some drunkard on his last round, some poet at the end of his sourdough loaf, decided to call love.

Love: often portrayed as pie-eyed, impossible contentedness with everything-no matter the facts, the stacked odds, and the misplaced grace of a given situation. Love: the shield, the coat, that bars the entrance of the outside elements. When you’re buried in love, as you damn well are, precious little matters. Just the continued run of the tap; you’ll do whatever it takes to keep the draught flowing. I did.

And so well, this is my story, learn something from it:

Jaime showed up with no answers at a bar that asked no questions.

She smiled, and her eyes-brown, but a light orange, golden brown held under a light-wrinkled at the corners.

Her face: draped in a shadow of practical anonymity that couldn’t hide the marked edges of a defined Scandinavian jawline.

She had stars-blue fearless shining stars in her eyes.

She sat next to me at the bar, with a red white green flannel shirt rolled at the sleeves, and she looked up and lost herself in the silent conversation of a galaxy old as the roots of her family tree’s eccentricities. I now know Jaime has a thing for the stars, always has and always will.

Back to that night: I sat and stumbled for words with a slack-jaw gaze, and a fearless heart that could pale the mad hunger of a lion locked on his prey.

I was hooked on her presence, her next to me, smiling at the high and tight red-eyed, unshaven fiend passed out on his stool to her left; her sitting at the bar and every minute that passed with her there, next to me, delivered a calm better than the drag of a smoke; but every hour that expired was an unnerving reminder we’d eventually part ways — the butt end glared in sight-the soothing sense of her presence faded.

The thing about reckless captivation is we throw ourselves at it-die over it-live on it-and drink to it. Without the scent of captivation our eyes glaze, our hearts freeze, and the rhythm of our breath’s river runs dry — it fucking halts.