Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.
I’m not an idiot, Kenji. I have reasons for the things I say.â€
“Yeah, and maybe I’m just saying that you have no idea what you’re saying.â€
“Whatever.â€
“Don’t whatever me—â€
“Whatever,†I say again.
“Oh my God,†Kenji says to no one in particular. “I think this girl wants to get her ass kicked.â€
“You couldn’t kick my ass if I had ten of them.â€
Kenji laughs out loud. “Is that a challenge?â€
"It’s a warning,†I say to him.
“Ohhhhhh, so you’re threatening me now? Little crybaby knows how to make threats now?â€
“Shut up, Kenji.â€
“Shut up, Kenji,†he repeats in a whiny voice, mocking me.