On Falling in Love
““Never has it felt more important for me to tell stories of joy and abandon, passion and recklessness. Life is short and difficult, people. We must take our pleasures where we can find them. Let us not become so cautious that we forget to live.””
To be frank, I didn’t think I’d ever know how to fall in love again. Enough waves have crashed into the cliffs of my heart to create this sharpened, jagged edged landscape that has weathered one too many storms. Love has been a scary, sharp, dangerous concept.
Apparently it’s in our inherent nature to fall in love. It’s wired within in us much like riding a bike. You do it once, you’ll remember forever. There’s something within each of our psyches that senses that familiar, but not so familiar feeling and says, “Yes! We will go towards this.” Like a moth to the flame, like riding a horse into the great unknown. Pretty romantic, but the horse could bolt at any second. Always on the cusp of something going wrong, but hopeful there’s a ride into the sunset. Our predisposition knows how to do it, but we don’t have a clue where we are going.
Now that I’m in my 30’s, I have a little bit of familiarity to draw from and declare that feelings can sometimes have a funny way of developing. It’s a slow, measured, calculated start, where experience has taught us to tread lightly. Protect. Don’t do anything stupid-- like fall in love. As much as we try to keep feelings under control, love has a tendency to hit you in a moment’s notice. John Green wrote about it in the most perfect, simple way:
“I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”
I knew I loved him on a Tuesday in the middle of June. It was a gorgeous day; the sun was out and the clouds blanketed the mountains that frame the North Shore of Kauai. A backdrop I see every day that serves the island as nourishment for the souls that call this place home. We were at the end of a long stretch of beach, in a little cove with a lighthouse sitting on top of the bluff. The jagged cliffs overlook the bright turquoise-blue ocean, and the sun was high enough to make the water sparkle. It’s the best time of the day, when the water sparkles. My calves burned from the mile walk in the sand to get there, but in my chest, I felt something new. It was something warm, gooey and slightly unfamiliar.
We got to the end, Third Beach they call it, where people usually go to lie naked, mostly because they can. We lay there in the sand, hair wet and water droplets glistening off our skin as the rain clouds began to roll in.
“Uh oh,” I said.
“Ooohh this is is fun”, he said in his exuberant but lazy, surfer accented voice where the syllables tend to blend into one another.
You can’t really predict the weather on Kauai, you know. It can change in an instant.
I smiled because I usually resist the rain when I’m out in the open. In The City it was a real nuisance—it caused traffic jams and getting anywhere was a hassle. Anything that slowed down the fast pace of life was always a hassle. Here, it’s a great excuse to stay inside and be lazy. To slow down.
But here on the beach, in the open air, there’s really no point in resisting when you’re soaking wet and coated in salt water.
We squeezed our way to half of the blanket, so we could take the other half and cover ourselves as we rode out the rain. The hot, sticky, humid June afternoon was relieved when the gray blanket moved across the sky to cover the sun, giving us a cool and cleansing Mother Nature shower. Our limbs tangled together as it started dumping, and I smiled because there was something electric within the droplets of rain that day.
I noticed the gooey feeling in my chest again.
Is that what I think it is? I looked into his ocean blue eyes, the same color of the water that day, the kind that pierces you and hypnotizes you and makes you do a silly thing like fall in love.
When we met, I felt like I knew him from somewhere—somewhere in the ether. His kind eyes told a story that we had met before. There was a point where our gaze locked for the first time, and something inside of me felt home. Felt safe. His eyes were so clear, so blue, so pure, that something in me told me it was something I could trust. I trusted him with my heart, even in the first 10 minutes. My jagged cliffs melted to goo.
We kissed, and I laughed, and I couldn’t help but close my eyes and rest my head on his arm, and in that second, I realized what was happening.
“Come on, dude,” I thought. “How did you trick me into falling in love with you like this?”
When the rain stopped, we peered from underneath the blanket as the sun began to poke out. As my skin exposed to the sun, I came out from under that blanket knowing something I didn’t an hour before.
It had been a long time since feelings like this had crept in, and there’s some truth when saying that a downpour can change things in an instant. We made our way back, across the mile stretch of sand and beach and jetty’s and cliffs, and he said something casually about falling in love.
“Don’t be scared of love,” He said.
“Too late for that,” I thought, as I smiled knowingly back, shaking my head.
He laughed at me, almost as if he read my mind. I can’t really hide anything when It comes to my feelings, and I wear my emotions blatantly in my expressions. I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve, I wear my heart on my face. I really must have looked like a deer in headlights. I looked over and watched the creases in his eyes form at the corners while he peered at me sideways, in the way that he does when he teases me. I quickly looked away as my heart skipped a few beats, and I closed my eyes in effort to steady the rhythm in my chest. I distracted myself as I examined the cliffs surrounding us, appreciating the protection they gave us. The stormy, powerful, eroding waters of the ocean have carved out such a beautiful, amazing sight.
I turned my gaze to face his, the Pacific Ocean stretching into the abyss behind him, the cliffs behind me, and he looked at me a little differently.
“I know that look,” I thought.
He’s looking at me the way I look at him.
Like he loves me too.