Love is affliction

I frequent places in the city, and there I find women. Women are everywhere, but every once in a while you find one that smacks into you like a truck. Cailey is her name. The long red hair. That shapely ass. Those dark eyes. Her thin, petite frame. That pale skin. Smitten.

Smitten and it feels like I'm bitten. Smitten like a kitten in yarn. Smitten like a man named Fritz in a biergarten.

I work up my courage. Some of it comes from a weed brownie. I approach her and ask why a certain generic floss was discontinued. She just explains what I already know. She looks at the floss display, perplexed. I'm looking at her. I see that her hair band is Underarmor brand. I bet she works out. She looks good, not flashy, no, naturally beautiful. So natural. Beautifully so.

I make light of the fact that I just talked to her about floss for a minute or two and thank her for the conversation. I move on to my next situation. Then comes the opening of the Winter Olympics. The store is teeming with promotional people. Even the store employees are involved. I spy Cailey in front of a dairy end display. She has shot glasses of orange juice to sample. I circle around, thwarted by fear. I head down the liquor aisle and notice that a baby's bottle of formula has spilled on the ground. Now's my chance. I approach Cailey. I tell her that there's a spill in the liquor aisle. It looks like eggnog. She gets on her walkie-talkie and her voice spills out over the store's intercom. I smile in approval. She seems encouraged and smiles back, our little aside about the situation. I ask her if her samples have liquor in them because so many of the others do. She assures me they don't. I ask her why there are so many promotional people in the store. She offers an explanation. I'm looking at her deeply, smiling benignly. Her eyes perhaps communicate interest. They've opened wider. I've seen this look before. Goddamn it always gets me. Goddamn.

I introduce myself. "My name is Jason by the way." "Cailey," she replies. I see her name tag. Cailey McMillan. This is so perfect. I soak up the moment. I hope that it will never end. But it does, as they all must do. But she gave me that look, damn it, she gave me that look!

That look is what? It's maybe something women do, perhaps unconsciously to curry attention, sometimes to indicate interest, but the two bleed together as they've always have since these women were children and the distinction between seriousness and play were consciously undetectable. So maybe I was wrong. I ask her out, and she tells me she has a boyfriend. I almost collapse in front of the dog chew bones that she's stocking. I am weak. I am blushing. She is too. We share an autonomic response, quietly. I say goodbye, and vow to talk to her once more but lose my composure every goddamn time I see her.

Maybe it's for the better. I'm so damn shy. I wish I could see her in the middle of nowhere so that others weren't watching, so that I didn't have to turn my little script into a public speech. I see her and I'm devastated, alone, observing my own court-sanctioned restraining order. I go home, cover myself in my sheets, close my eyes, and sleep off the devastation that only I visit upon myself with the mere butterfly kiss of an encounter. I am compassion and fatigue rolled into one. I am prepared at any moment to dive on a grenade to save her. I am not there when she's amidst me. My self, that mental apparatus that assumes a cockpit between my ears, gets obliterated in her presence. I am porous. I have no boundaries. I am simply nervous responses and delayed hormonal saturation gradients bobbing up and down upon a skeleton in her midst. I am lost.

I want to hold her body close to mine, always from behind. I want to kiss her on the ear and whisper something sweet in there. I want to run my hands across her shoulders and slide my fingers onto her scalp from the back of her head. I want to breath heavy on her most sensitive places and I want to speak sensitive things into her most sacred of selves. I want to protect her, care for her, love her, listen to hear, learn from her, become everything she'd ever want me to be for her. And I'd do it all for her because, hell, for the simple reason I don't want to exist. She'd kill me if not completely at least temporarily in that I could be reborn amidst her in a moment of affection, attention, and love.

Love is affliction, to me it is. I am burdened by emotions too strong to contain. And as hard as I try to maintain my composure it becomes a clear sign of my interest in others that I am pained when they are not near me or don't desire to be. I wilt like a flower that has been uprooted because I am.  I'm uprooted by the sheer joy and the shock of a desire too strong to contain, so strong indeed that this stationary flower would risk being uprooted to be near the source of its pain.