On Falling in Love (and Little Red)

Well, I am 38--just, but still. It's been a long time now since I fell in love in terms of what we usually mean when we talk about falling in love. But earlier today, and I will explain what triggered this later, I was thinking about how actually I fall in love with people and things all the time. Tonight, for example, I fell hopelessly in love with Annika all over again moments after I wasn't sure how I was going to get through the rest of the evening. I had managed to get Lily to bed, and to sleep--after only one change of nightwear ("I'm just in more of a mood for a nightgown, Mama,"--I guess I fell in love with her all over again, too, in that instant)--and I was sitting in the reclining chair, holding Annika, feeding her, forgetting to be mindful of the preciousness of the moment. In fact, I was so far from minding the preciousness of the moment that I was actually half-watching an Iron Chef episode while willing her to fall asleep, silently begging, my mind filled with all of the things I both had to and wanted to do on this particular night. I mean this backstory as a transition from last night's entry, but see, I am still new to this: Blog entries don't need transitions, do they? I will move it along.

Anyway, I looked down at Annika, really looked at her, just as she took a deep, satisfied sigh, and she grinned at me. It was a cockeyed grin that reached her eyes, so completely trusting and satiated and, well, happy, and then, when I grinned back, involuntarily, she chortled, and I thought, in that instant, that I had never loved anyone or anything so much. But as I explained to Lily the other day, the great thing about love is that it works like this. There is just so much of it--and it never has to be, never should be, quantified, I forget this sometimes.

I am worried I am heading off in the wrong direction, and I will write about Lily's concerns about the possibly finite nature of love another time. And the kind of love one has for one's children is not exactly what I want to arrive at here, anyway, as that is not a "falling in love," really, it is perhaps the only kind of love that doesn't require the falling. What I want to write about now is how we have the capacity to fall in love with something and how doing so--and I know I run the risk of sounding over the top here--sort of validates the space you take up as a human being on the planet and gives you the kind of interconnectedness that makes the span of time you have worthwhile.

Okay. I'm not explaining this well, and I still haven't gotten to the point or explained in any way how this relates to my writing. Let me keep trying. Have you ever done something or seen something or heard something and just thought in a really pure and unfiltered kind of way: I love that? And then, have you ever thought about how your loving whatever it is--for me, the Rolling Stones' "Ruby Tuesday," Epoisses cheese, an hour almost twenty years ago at a little tiny nothing cafe in the Marais with a friend who always make me feel profoundly understood--is actually an enormous, enveloping part of who you are? And then, bear with me, I am feeling the strain of this too, have you ever stopped to think about what your life would be like if you didn't ever fall in love this way?

I am not sure if this is inappropriate, as I didn't ask the artist's permission, but I am working on a children's story, which now will be about, I hope, a girl called Little Red, and birds, and birch trees, and a world in which colors seem riper and shapes seem cleaner, and the reason I am finally doing this--and it is hard, much harder than I expected--is because I fell in love with the work of an artist. Maybe you will too. Because I know how to do this now, and because it is almost as satisfying to share something you love like this as it is to actually love it, here is the link to see for yourself: The Art. More on the story to come.