stories and romance

I don't know if it's the spring - the thaw, the sun, the rain - but I've felt very romantically-minded lately. Is love in the air? Who knows. Not any more than usual, I suppose, haha.

But staring out the window at work the other day, chatting with my friend, who is a very passionate, sensitive, romantically-minded woman as well, we got to talking about how much we both love the rain, and I was reminded of my first kiss in the rain, and how do we even speak of such things without sounding completely cliche and ridiculous? but it was probably still one of the best kisses of my life, even though I haven't seen that person in over ten years and he means nothing to me and he was a total jerk. The point is, it wasn't really him, even though it partly was. It was the rain. It was the night. It was the illicitness of the situation - we were young, he was my boss, my parents hated him - but more than anything else it was the rain. The rain is what keeps that kiss in my memory, the feel of wet staccato and skin sliding under fingertips, hair matted to cheeks.

And last night I heard two stories, one very similar to one I could tell but with so much more complication - and you think your life is complicated! - and the other so unlike anything I could know.

Imagine two kids, growing up in a small village in Peru. He says he wants to run away with her and one day she shows up at his place with a bag, ready. They're fourteen, but it's forever, so he packs a bag, throwing anything he can into a suitcase, and they head to Cuzco, no warning. Their families are freaking out, worried, they try to reassure them over telephone wire, it's forever. Things are tough, but eventually they are better, they're selling flowers in the plaza, and they live like this for ten years. And then she meets a Frenchman and he, heartbroken of course, moves first to LA and then to New York, the Peruvian in the funny hat. So romantic.

And me? I'm listening to Ely Guerra and pretending it's a rainy day so I can lounge around the house writing instead of enjoying one of the first lovely spring days in New York. Because I would rather be alone with my thoughts than alone in this beautiful weather. Hahaha, maybe. So dramatic.

Really it's because I'm working on a story about a woman who's just come back from a year abroad - a year of five-minute romances and books in cafes and bicycles on the Mediterranean coasts - and she comes back to all the things she left and is leaving, and she feels guilty about maybe feeling vaguely superior, and everything's the same and everything's different, old and new at the same time, and so is she, and it's so unfinished. It's so unfinished.