(unLtiOtlVedE)

As a very young girl my favorite place was this space where the four trunks of a willow tree converged into a small nook just my size. The tree stood with it's sad green branches swaying at the far corner of our yard, so I was as far away as I could be while still in the vicinity of my mother's call. Sometimes I would invite her to join me, to eat pretend tomato soup or quietly braid each other's hair, but mostly I liked to be alone. As I lay in my little world of peeling bark and crispy, narrow leaves, I remember looking upwards at the glinting sunlight through the canopy and dreaming about love. My squeaky clean illusions of it at the time sometimes slip through reality's cracks, but most of them were lost in that willow.

Love, back then, was freshly brushed teeth and a shiny, newly waxed convertible. Perfectly timed kisses on an unexpecting neck and bright orange tulips wrapped in green ribbon. Two spoons in a drawer. Lights turning off on either side of the squishy bed at the very same time, and silent, blissful sleep. Years and locations matching like puzzles, and a simultaneous, drowning passion for one another: an unmelting chocolate ice cream cone that lasts forever.

"When it comes to love, there are a million theories to explain it. But when it comes to love stories, things are simpler. A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims -- these are lucky eventualities but they aren't love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name."
-Jeffrey Eugenides, a master of pen and page, in My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead.

Today, I think about being back in the comforting arms of that willow tree, sipping tea from an invisible cup and being completely oblivious to what real love would turn out to be. A pristine white plate with a hairline crack down the middle. A stubbed toe. A bruised apple. A broken clock or a skipping CD. The lint in a belly button. Twisted decisions and piles of corks and cigarette butts. The feeling you get when you've lost something, or forgotten the name of an actress or the title of a movie: that vacancy, that frustration. As unpredictable as waves on the sea, crashing on your back or your chest when you least expect it, and then calm when you approach it with a surf board. Standing on the shoreline with the sand beneath your toes, you throw the surf board into the quiet water, and run up the dunes without glimpsing back.

But I do glimpse back. I always do. Cold ocean water is so inviting.