When I saw him, my heart leapt.
A corny phrase, a cliche I never understood before, for it did leap. A mass jumped up and out in my chest. Not my lungs, not my breath, although that and my heartbeat did speed up, just enough to notice. The air was fuller to breathe. My eyes were open wider and saw fuller to the periphery. Colours were saturated and contrasts deepened. I wondered about molecules and how they were all interacting with my senses. My attention span was consumed. He had passed from sight. I was in the restaurant but I had no idea what my lunchmate was saying. He was somewhere in the mall. Still in the mall? Nearby?

Then, thanks to my chance encounter with Wendy in the mall, I was sitting at his table in the food court. His family was there: son, mother, father, sister, sister's fiance, .. Wendy and friends were there, and although I had completely convinced myself just days ago that I hated him, I found myself staring at his eyelashes. Watching his son play. How he'd grown since I'd seen him last! Back to his eyelashes, his hair. His face, his mouth, his eyes - how they were very blue that day, like his father's, what he was wearing: a New York Giants Sweatshirt. And I had on, under my winter layers, his New York Giants T shirt. I had not worn it in weeks, maybe months, and I chose it this morning. I was mad at him and I wanted my CD's back, yet I was sitting mute, memorizing him once again for "when I never see him again".

At home later, his name in capital letters blazed across my field of vision. Not neon, not flashing. Solid, ubiquitous, independent of my free will. As I told Wendy, if I wasn't so crazy for him, I wouldn't even like him. But I have about as much choice in this as I do in breathing. Involuntary yet mandatory for existence. Will him out of my thoughts? How? He was the first thought I had upon awakening. And then I was so awake. His face, I can even draw it on the Etch-a-Sketch. Almost without thinking his likeness appeared. "My downfall" I call it.

So what is this lesson God is teaching me? Why now, and for the first time, and why him? To learn selfless love? I don't know. I thought it was to prove to me that I can love. Surely that lesson has passed. Maybe he needs to be loved. Even by me, whom he doesn't seek out often. Yet he is included in my prayers, in my thoughts. Is that by design? Every time I ask God about it, I feel I am being told my patience will be rewarded. When I open myself to faith, that is the message I always receive. When a friend said it is okay to ask God for a sign, I finally acquiesced, and as I walked along the sidewalk I just then looked down to see LOVE painted in graffiti before my feet. Embrace love? With its attendant pain? Surrender? Who can help but surrender in the face of love? It is not in my hands how I feel. It is in my heart.

What next? What pain? What exquisite tortuous thoughts are yet to haunt me? What dashed hopes? What crippled dreams? The sadness upon awakening to another empty day without.... without becomes without hope, and that begats the -less's: hopeless, helpless, and ultimately soulless. God save me from another day without.
© 1999


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