How I Met My True Love
My True Love (TL) and I have been together, in one form or another, since I was very young. TL sometimes visited my mother on the farm, and I flirted with her, in the innocent way that little girls flirt with their fathers, or strangers bearing gifts, or the gingerbread bricks and candy mortar of a delicious house that belongs to someone else.
We first met officially, and on our own terms, when I was in the fourth grade, in that glorious place called the bookmobile. The public library in town sent the bookmobile out to the country three times in the summer to supply books to farm children. To this day, her smell takes me back to that sweet encounter. I found her colorful, entrancing, and certainly too profound for the likes of me, a skinny farm girl with no socks inside her shoes. But she remembered me from my earlier dalliances. And isn’t that just the kind of attention we crave as children? To be noticed, to inspire awe at how much we have grown, how like an adult we have become? TL gave me A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. The bookmobile rule was to return the book at the next visit, of course, but TL allowed me to keep it. That first gift inspired a lifelong interest in fiction, science, philosophy, foreign languages, and the struggle between Good and Evil.
My high school years with TL raced by, unimpeded by external disapproval. I was old enough to escape the concerns of my parents, and TL and I fell into an easy routine of spending every evening and weekend together. She, being older and wiser than I, insisted that I keep up with my school studies: Lord of the Flies, Farenheit 451, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird. I offered no resistance. My aptitude for English pleased TL immeasurably. I, in turn, spent all my free time with her, yearning to know her better. She introduced me to authors I could not access at my rural high school: Ayn Rand, John Steinbeck, Thomas Hardy, the Bronte sisters, Dickens, and Dante.
Our relationship grew more intense during my college years. As I gained a deeper knowledge of TL, I struggled to truly understand her. Intense studies of Faulkner, Austen, Fitzgerald, and Pirandello tried us. At the same time, I formed peripheral relationships with others, some unknown to her. Fiction and nonfiction by unknown authors found their way into my world, and I developed a fascination with neurology and the study of creativity itself. Books by physicists Richard Feynman and Jean Emile Charon began to appear in my library. I hooked up with my professors and fellow writers after class, and spent increasing stretches of time in bars reading their works, smoking cigars and lamenting my relationship with TL. How could I have let it come this far without question? Back in high school, when the English teacher had asked why Daisy cries when Gatsby tosses his beautiful colored shirts in the air, I had answered that it was out of happiness. I earned an A for that answer. Yet, there I sat, a cigar in one hand and a tequila in the other, knowing--absolutely knowing--that was the wrong answer. Daisy’s tears were of hopelessness. She would never be able to make a life with Gatsby. He didn’t even know enough to buy white shirts. Had TL let me down? Had she let down any of the friends who had come to know her almost as well as I?
I succumbed to the occasional brief fling with the opposite sex, which would temporarily draw me away from TL. She is not the jealous type, though I cannot say as much for the boyfriends. One particularly insecure lover “accidentally” shattered my marble bust of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare was one of my most treasured gifts from TL. I always went back to her, and TL had no opinion on the subject whatsoever. She is a force, like water, or gravity. I can try to live without her, but my very existence depends on her sustenance and invisible attraction. Nothing and no one else gives so much, and asks so little in return—only that I read.
TL and I have been engaged for years now. Marriage is out of the question, being illegal, but I believe us to be irrevocably wed. I, for one, am totally committed, despite the fact that, ultimately, she can never really belong to just one person. I have tasted her gifts. I have eaten from the gingerbread house, tentatively at first, and then with abandon. I have consumed. And now I am consumed. This kind of love is not exactly forbidden, yet nor is it exactly common. Now, as then, others like us meet in specific places designed to encourage such relationships, most notably university campuses and the quiet corners of coffee houses. Out in the general public, unless both parties are ageless and famous, our kind of love is egregiously misunderstood. I hope the children we create will be beautiful and inspiring. And how will that impossible feat be accomplished, you may wonder. Actually, I intend to be the bearer of any progeny from our relationship. I would like to think that TL’s participation will be—if not literal—then literative.