Love

(Pictured above: My girlfriend Mica, a very talented artist, drew a profile view of me, which turned out pretty damn great. Then she asked me to do the same. I only ever draw stick figures and monsters, so my version of her came out a little bit as both. In real life she’s beautiful.)

I read a study once that something like 98% of American movies are about romance, or at least have some sort of sub-plot. It makes sense, then, that I’ve been looking forward to falling in love for as long as I can remember. Love seemed like something inevitable that would happen later on when I was a kid, like getting a job or dying. I never really explored dating in elementary school, mostly because I was with the same group of seven kids from Kindergarten through sixth grade, so we were all practically siblings. Part of why I looked forward to moving to a larger middle school in seventh grade was that I might finally have a chance to get a girlfriend. But middle school passed by, then high school, and most of college without anything more serious than asking someone to a dance. As I saw my friends pair up and profess love, I felt profoundly left out. There were so many milestones I hadn’t passed, not so much sexual stuff (I’d learned that “virgin” was something other than an epithet for Mary, Mother of Christ as recently as eighth grade, so even in my high school I wasn’t really in that mindset*), but so many cultural markers of what it meant to become and adult and form a real, powerful relationship with another person.

Things changed when I went to Florida with the track team last year. It felt like one of those books where a kid gets thrown into a new world: when I fell asleep on the bus there was snow on the ground, and when I woke up it was eighty degrees and the roads were lined with jungle plants I thought only existed in prehistoric times. In that different world, the bad luck I’d been locked into changed in an instant: Mica, a young woman on the team who I’d always thought was pretty but never had the courage to talk to, sat down next to me and started talking to me. As soon as we found out we were both writers, we started talking about our work and were nearly inseparable for the rest of the trip**. We went to a bookstore together and walked up and down the shelves, pointing out different things we’d read. On the bus ride back she sang selections from Les Miserables with some friends on the women’s team for me and I called a number on a billboard asking “Want to Talk About God?” and asked the guy on the other end of the line if I could have 800 concubines like King Solomon to prove to her that I wasn’t a fundamentalist. She was (and is) witty and incisive, brilliant and inventive, beautiful, graceful, bold enough to challenge me when I’m wrong but kind and supportive all the same. Less than a month after getting back we were dating.

I’d daydreamed about the stages of a relationship since middle school: first time holding hands, first kiss, first dance at a party, first date, changing your Facebook relationship status.

Through high school and into college, as they seemed less likely to ever happen, these milestones haunted me even as I fantasized about them. Once I met Mica, they all passed so quickly and seemed nearly weightless. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy them, but they didn’t have the same force I thought they would. It wasn’t the benchmark that mattered anymore, but who I was doing it with. I didn’t love Mica because she bumped up my score on some life-goal tally. I loved her (and love her) because she laughs when I overpronounce my T’s and gives me honest sentence-by-sentence feedback on all my stories and makes a big deal about using her special wash on my face to get the dead skin off and sometimes breaks out singing something I can’t understand in Spanish and hundreds or thousands or countless other things, little and big, that make her Mica, my beloved.

Sometimes I can’t believe how much time I wasted, desperately wanting something that didn’t turn out to be important. When I thought of myself with a girlfriend, I didn’t see her as a person so much as a solution to my loneliness and anxiety and feeling of failure. But love is so much more than just a solution: it’s its own being, its own creation, something beautiful and indescribable and unique to everyone who feels it. So much of life would have been so much easier if I could’ve assured my past self not to worry, that it would all turn out okay eventually. But my past self probably wouldn’t’ve believed me, at least not until he met Mica.

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* Of course, I heard about non-Mary people referred to as virgins before, but I always thought it designated them as Mary like: kind, devout, and courageous. In middle school some boys, who I only later realized were bullying me, asked me if I was a virgin and I said, “I hope to be some day, but I don’t think I’m there yet.” At some point I saw a poster for the movie “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” and decided that it was a raunchy, iconoclastic comedy in which Steve Carrel played a middle-aged atheist whose life is turned upside down when he finds himself pregnant with Jesus for the Second Coming. In conclusion, my childhood was defined by both misinformation and boundless unwarranted confidence that I had everything figured out.

** She actually got to know me pretty well from reading this very blog! Pretty meta, huh?