vignette: october

She is like coming across an unfamiliar word.

I recognize the letters, can guess at the sense of it, but know absolutely nothing of its meaning. My intelligence, my vanity, wrestles with the notion of staring at something whose significance I should be aware of, context or no context. I am the one reduced to conjecture, grasping at straws but accepting the word anyway, trusting in my powers of deductive reasoning.

Because when I first saw her, my brain had a hard-on.

“Let’s have coffee.” Her lips move, lip liner glistening, a somber shade of pink furious in its exactness. Her eyes lighting up, Christmastime in October, when I give what must be an idiotic smile and she grabs at my arm with a precision that adds to my body’s vocabulary of unusual intimacies.

“It’s raining.” I state the obvious, pointing out the dull sheen of droplets that chose to fall then and there (me: rain, rain, go away, come again another day). We stop at the edge of the promenade, her face forming a question for a brief moment before she punctures my gravity with a statement so pure, so true, so utterly banal that the sensible part of me can only shrug in response.

“So what?” So what, indeed.

And she’s pulling at me again and we are running, running through the rain, breaking the invisible barrier of propriety that separates children from the dourness of adulthood. When she laughs, I cannot help but laugh as well; it is infectious, impossible to contradict, impossible to deny – and I’m wet and dazed and shuddering in a state which my erect mind tells me can only be love.

It goes against my nature to be passionate, but when blood is pumping, I get fucking crazy.