MY HEART

 Just like there are so many love stories that ended in tragedy, but we still fall in love; we should also believe in ourselves when everyone else doesn’t, when everything else stops working. I am a man with strong convictions, with a level of skepticism and a sense of realism intertwined with enormous optimism.

Life dealt me some good sets of cards for years, and then one day, it stopped. Of course, I started drifting in and out of depression, but my formidable optimism always managed to pull me out of the gutters that I had propelled myself into time and again. The universe, however, has a way of surprising us with gifts. Most of which we didn’t know we needed.

My gift came in the form of a slender girl with chocolate complexion, she had small breasts; the kind that became a fluid and my hand was a cup; she had a thin long arm with thin muscles, her hips were a bit protruding, and her buttocks were perfectly round, with more emphasis on the shape rather than the volume. She had perfect teeth, only that she had a gap at the upper left of her teeth, just between the canine and the incisor; I don’t know if it made her more beautiful or more sexy, perhaps both. She was soft where I was hard; we were like heaven and earth, the winds and the tides, the expansive length of the desert and the ocean, the sunrise and the sunset. So different but connected somehow, to provide meaning to the meaningless, we were both important parts of the whole. The whole picture. Her name was Anya.

I am not a strong believer of love. Though I have read and heard of great love stories, I never really thought of myself as the recipient. Or the giver of love. I knew one thing though, if I was to ever fall in love, I wanted it to be consuming, fast, strong, intoxicating; more like the wind that comes too strongly only to disappear few seconds later after achieving great destruction or the lightning that terrorizes and kills but disappears within seconds, or the cigarette that lights up fast but still leaves the smoker with unexplainable pleasure. I wanted the kind of love that would kill me if it wants; the kind like Romeo and Juliet’s. Of course, I didn’t want the love that I went around in pursuit of. I wanted the love that just happened; the one with a perfect illusion of being at the right place at the right time. If I am to fall in love with a woman, I want it to show that everything she had been doing since the beginning of her life was to bring her to that exact moment that she meets me.

Anya came into my life, and suddenly my thoughts of love changed completely. She met me when I didn’t believe in love. My view of love was not a matter of when, but if it will ever happen in the first place. A man resorts to his old ways eventually, so when I met her, I treated her just the way I treated my past flings: with no sense of urgency or importance. If the sex was good, maybe a second time would be inevitable, but the third time was a taboo. The sex was heavenly of course, and even when I told her I wasn’t looking for anything serious, she didn’t question me or anything like that, she simply understood and took off. So, when I asked her for the second time sex, she respectfully declined, “The sex was great and all, but I am not the kind of girl who glorifies flings. Sorry.” She didn’t wait for my reply. This was the first time it happened in months, and I was not at a place where I could pursue such minor matters. So, I let her go.

I bumped into her again at my favorite bar. She was with a group of her workmates. We are celebrating for making as much profits in this quarter than all the other three combined. She had told me. I have never had a deeper conversation with any other woman like the one I had with Anya. All the great novelists that I liked: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Chekhov, Bukowsky, and the likes. We talked about anything and everything and nothing. She just got me. We didn’t think the same or anything; she had this aura of calmness that I adored. While I spent the most of my time fretting about my book, crafting characters and scenes and dialogues in my head, sometimes I find it hard to live in the moment, which is something that I would very much like to do. Anya just lived. Her job was demanding since she worked at a big pharma company, but that never deterred her from living a really fun life. She wasn’t loud nor the life of the party; she just lived. While I was busy putting out fires that I created by myself, she was busy enjoying the breeze that was her life.

When she came to my house for an official date, I made use of all the experience I had as a cook. I have lived quite an interesting life, out of necessity rather than out of choice. I was a chef for 8 months at a certain restaurant, a skill which impressed most ladies. She came in when I was about to start, which was not what we had agreed upon. It’s better if we cooked together, it’ll be more fun. She told me. Well, cowboy, giddy up then. It was fun, I agree. What I loved most about her was how easy on me she was. I am a pretty reserved guy so most things I prefer to keep to myself; the cause of the abrupt endings of most of my past relationships. But not Anya. She simply let me be. She didn’t tell me I was enough, she showed me. She gave me reassuring looks, one that I greatly adore. Whenever I was stuck in my book, she just rubbed my shoulders and looked at me with admiration. It was the kind of look that every man wants to experience at least once in their lives, and most never do. Everything will be okay, baby. I believe in you, even if I will be the only one doing so once you stop believing in yourself. What follows next I can’t explain. I fell for her. Hard. Harder than when Tortoise lied to the birds from the sky and was left to fall over hard objects to create the shells he now has. Only that I fell hard on the soft embrace of my woman, as soft as her kisses, as majestic as her love for me. Now, I go to sleep with her in my arms and I wake up to the sweet aroma of the mix of her morning breath and the breakfast in bed. She belongs to me and I belong to her. All of a sudden I don’t want a love as brief and powerful like lightning; I want to love this woman until death takes her away from me, and I will fight that beast until it takes us both. And if death decides to hide her from my sight in the middle of the billions before us, I will soar across skies, scale mountains, over thousands of years if I have to, until I find my flower, my muse, and bring her to her rightful place: by my side and in my heart.