“This morning I remembered how it feels to be in love. Hell, this morning I was in love again. I think it may have been something I dreamed. You can’t find love by itself, in the air, so of course I needed a rainy-day color, an old texture. And that color, texture: a school uniform I thought I’d thrown out. Yet here we were in class again, crammed into the same chair and ignoring each other’s thighs. Love sprouts where it’s not supposed to, in my experience – or at least, like a mushroom, where the first man wouldn’t have expected it. But as the first man becomes the second, we learn the ways of the earth and know which trees to check. We collect, chore-like. Are these fleshy loves gathered in arms? Fleshy, yes, but not loves. We can smell them roasting. We know they’re not poisonous. The love I remember, I never picked. Scared, I let it spread many rootlets. So I guess it makes sense that it would still be there, on the other side of my childhood maple – wet with rains, quiet, pulsing.”
This morning I remembered how it feels to be in love. Hell, this morning I was in love again. I think it may have been something I dreamed. You can’t find love by itself, in the air, so of course I needed a rainy-day color, an old texture. And that color, texture: a school uniform I thought I’d thrown out. Yet here we were in class again, crammed into the same chair and ignoring each other’s thighs. Love sprouts where it’s not supposed to, in my experience – or at least, like a mushroom, where the first man wouldn’t have expected it. But as the first man becomes the second, we learn the ways of the earth and know which trees to check. We collect, chore-like. Are these fleshy loves gathered in arms? Fleshy, yes, but not loves. We can smell them roasting. We know they’re not poisonous. The love I remember, I never picked. Scared, I let it spread many rootlets. So I guess it makes sense that it would still be there, on the other side of my childhood maple – wet with rains, quiet, pulsing.
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