It took longer than expected to come back around, but we eventually did. The foiled plans were a welcome, healthy delay; it gave me more time to regroup, and allow my excess of feelings to deflate to an ordinary, rough unstateliness. I wanted to meet this person again, with simple eyes. I arrived early for our date, so I took a short walk around her neighborhood, casually discarding the remaining remenants of my overcooked imagination into the brambles and front yards. I found her straddling the garden, sorting out the hidden, ripe cherry tomatoes from an overwhelming mess of vines. I held the light for her. It was pretty adorable. Her apartment was compact and pleasantly, messily filled, accompanied by a varied assortment of plants and succulents (she’s a landscape architect). She seemed genuinely appreciative of the mix I made her of some favorite Ethiopian tunes, a music she told me she had only recently discovered. I filled the B-side with other solid jams, only afterwards realizing they're all songs of love and longing. Really though, what songs aren't? It was unintentional, though I also won't deny other meanings.

Everything I found attractive about her the first time returned — her openness and self-ease, her free-wheeling conversational energy and intensity, her curiously frazzled hair and etched features. I couldn’t help but sense there was some unspeakable magnetism at play. While we talked about many things, and shared an inordinate number of interests, they felt merely like tiny, satisfying blips on the surface of a large sea, which seemed to hold something poignantly obscure and enchanting below. The pizza was small and flavorful, as were the blackened peppers. Misreading the receipt and mildly tipsy, I massively overtipped. Lucky for them.

I’m still not going to claim that I know anything here -- and perhaps one never does anyway, anywhere. It felt natural and well-paced. Nevertheless I’m forcing myself to take nothing for granted, and reconstruct everything each time, because only by layering these delicately sheer experiences upon each other am I able to see consistencies, the blots and smearings that align in colorful corrolations that I'd call truth. If you empty yourself repeatedly, and a thing still emerges and grows in complexity, something potent and metaphysical must be true about either you or it or what's happening between. I want to be in the midst of that process, of that renewable energy, for as long as possible.