Pardon the Mush

I think what floors me the most about this new love is the tenuousness of it all.

I mean, most meetings are tenuous and a matter of things just happening to fall into place. But with N-A, it seems particularly so, a mere matter of chance sneezing at just the right moment. I think perhaps it's because we knew OF each other but just didn't KNOW. All that proximity without a wit of knowing.

I mean, we'd both been inhabitants of the neighborhood for a few years, but it's like our planets were on a trajectory where we merely circled one another, our shadows never falling across the face of the other's geography. I'd walked past him handfuls of times in my neighborhood, sometimes making eye contact, sometimes not, sometimes saying hi, sometimes not. I'd talked to him once or twice, never even CONSIDERING possibilities.

And every day, I'm reminded of how so many little things could've continued to keep our planets from colliding: not having met MOL, MOL not mentioning N-A in conversation, MOL not having vanished for the summer, not having decided to read at the coffeeshop on that particular day, not having allowed myself to be engaged in conversation, N-A not having spontaneously asked me to the movies, not having had an uncharacteristic burst of spontaneity and taken him up on the invite. As though, if one of us had, say, coughed or flicked a bug off our knee, it could've sent events cartwheeling in an entirely different direction. It's really quite ridiculous.

For a while N-A was angry about all this--that we could've entirely missed each other with just the slightest alteration in the chain of events that sent us skittering into collision. "But what if...?" he'd say. "What if...? I mean, all it would've taken is one small thing, and we could've totally missed out on each other."

And yet, so flukily, so unexpectedly, so strangely, one little spontaneous question spirals into all this.

Yesterday he said he had a gift for me. Grinning, he told me to take down the black garbage bag off his shelf. Inside were two shirts, a sweater, and two pairs of men's pants, all of which he had thrifted for me. All of which fit. And all of which were cute and me.

Yesterday, he called me

Suckerface
Kevin Costner dream haver
Bugger eater
Period blood drinker
Domesticated cat fucker
Coochie coddle
Clit flicker of strange fat women
Woman's mustache licker

Yesterday, one of his wiry beard hairs was stuck to my toothpaste and it made me grin.

It's things like these that make me think of what we could've blindly stumbled past in the unknowing, and it makes my breath catch in my throat.

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