we had a fight over falafel one night. it's not how i wanted to start the story, but we had a fight over falafel because i was feeling very unsexy, unenterable, impermeable, and had a sadistic compulsion to go hunt for my own falafel place. fittingly it was bad, i remain hungry. i limped back to your corner of the square having swallowed a very dry, crumbly bit of ego.
i'm worried that if we sit and stare at each other for too long you will see me falling apart too. i don't know a lot about love but it deserves more than a dinner table where i say are you listening and you respond to what question? maybe i'm not being clear enough.
when we are on the bus to prague two very loud french girls are very loudly fingering each other -- rather one is getting fingered by the other -- which we realize first by the violent thumping on the back of my seat which is reverberating into yours.
"I think --" I begin.
"-- I know." you say. More thumping, faster. We four are all somehow implicated in it. Then you add, "I know that smell anywhere."
Which is disgusting and horrible and we laugh. It takes me by surprise, that this is the first time we've laughed together in a very long time. i want to go thank them but they are giggling and falling over each others matching tracksuits away into the sunset over the eastern wall.
I don't know anything particular about love. I do know it's very possible to be consumed by the particulars when something is singular until you've lost sight of the roof of the myopic blossom of the moment you are in. it's funny we say "single" to signal the opposite of this perfect singular union.
one day in the near future i will be thinking about how it's like an accordion, single and the singularity. one day soon, i think, i'll be trying to unfold the instantaneous and the long sweeping motions of it from a body on the other end. trying to remember, as i say to somebody in a coffeeshop something about my time this summer travelling, and how no effort in life is wasted.