To be in love

By Elika Khosravani

It is spring again and everyone is day-dreaming about falling in love again. Again. And again and again and again, until it finally sticks. So my mind, naturally, is also turned towards love.

To be in love, I imagine, must feel like a lighthouse. A crumbling column on a crag, dangling delicately over the frothing sea. A lonely boat, guided by a single lantern and a ramshackled anchor, hesitantly heads toward the shoreline, toward the red and white tower, a fleck in the horizon. The sailor can see the shadow of a woman, wading through the windows, and is drawn homewards. The sailor can see a scale-spangled silhouette resting on a rock, and spins the helm, sea-bound once more. The sailor can see the woman and the siren melting into the morning mist; like a black touch, slippery fish. I’d be lucky to be that sailor, that woman, that siren. 

Perhaps it feels like swimming in stardust, in a birdsong, in a honeysuckle mid-bloom. There are tenantless memories curving across my ribs. It feels like remembering, it feels like grief, it feels like joy, it feels like there is something twisting inside me, and it feels like I could believe in angels again. I can see it so clearly now. Soft eyes and bruised knuckles and a row of sharp teeth shaped like infatuation. She would look at me in a way I have never been looked at before and I would never be looked at the same way ever again. My laughter coils until it lashes out like a whip, until I quiet down and snap into focus, just for her. I feel this way about her before I even meet her. 

In the meantime, I have laid my fascination with love to rest, a springtime hibernation. This is how: I spent my birthday with my best friends, baking a lemon sponge cake topped with lavender earl-grey frosting and twenty candles. I swayed at shoegaze concerts and befriended cruel bouncers. I laughed when they turned me away and shook their hands before I left. I slept with a candle burning and then dreamt of burning alive. I crashed a costume party and left with a phone number scrawled on a napkin and a handwritten recipe for homemade kombucha. I ran through the park on a rainy Saturday, down the rabbit hole of the West Side Highway until I stopped to watch two old women sweep puddles off of their picnic table. I chewed on the inside of my cheeks and on sunflower seeds and spat them out into dirty ashtrays—strewn among spit and salt and spirits, like a cinder carcass. I swam in a clear creek upstate and dug around for clam shells and let the water reach my knees and soak my jeans dark. I got violently drunk at a stranger’s apartment and let the ceiling fan spin a little longer. I discovered that I cannot be celibate for long, or date people born on the twenty-second of anything—they are not to be trusted. I wrote silly limericks with tiny magnets on the fridge. I sat at a busy train station, trying to enjoy the space between who I am and who I want to be. I spared a moment to mourn who I used to be; I think the space between is who we truly are. And I will never live with this version of myself again, so I slowed down to be with her. 

Spring is not over yet.