I did it without thinking.
My girlfriend and I were sitting across from each other at a hotel pool in Thailand. We were having a snack with another couple we’d just met. As I turned to look at her I noticed a small crumb stuck to her face. Normally I’d point it out to her so she could wipe it off.
This time, however, I just plucked the crumb off her face and put it in my mouth.
It happened so quickly it wasn’t until after I had done it that I realized what just happened. What was wrong with me? I had just eaten food off my girlfriend’s face without thinking twice about it.
And then I realized; Oh, this is love.
It was the clearest and most effortless example of what I had been feeling for some time now. Being in love is such a strange and unique experience. It is often personified not by the grand gestures we might anticipate, but by the smaller, more surprising moments. The behaviors others cannot see. The wildly unexpected interactions.
At least, that is my impression so far. It is not my intention to define or corral love into what it is and what it isn’t. Such exercises are useless. I am more interested in what love has become for me, or perhaps, how it has presented and revealed itself.
The old wisdom says when you are in love you just know. But that hasn’t explained the millions of people who thought they were in love but weren’t. How does one know instead of just think? Of course, nobody can tell you. And for years that left me on the fringes of love. I had loved and been loved, but never fully immersed, drenched in the warm light as those in the know seem to be.
It didn’t strike me the way I thought it would; the choir of angels and a crystallized vision. It snuck up on me when I wasn’t paying attention. Like at 5 am a couple of years ago when I was leaving home for a flight.
As I dressed carefully and silently in the dark so as not to wake my girlfriend, I felt this heavy pain grow in volume within my heart.
It wasn’t because I was worried about the nature of the trip, nor was it about the length of time I’d be gone, as I would be home within a matter of days. It was the act of leaving her. Of waking her up to tell her I had to go.
I was not prepared for the feeling of muted panic and separation. A precarious heat crept behind my eyes as I sat on the edge of the bed to say goodbye. I have never been one for a perfunctory kiss or hug goodbye. I like heavy wax seals on most interactions. That morning, there were not enough kisses or hugs I could have before leaving to make this parting feeling Ok.
The feeling dissipated until take off when it came roaring back. As we rumbled down the runway, picking up speed, all the terrible what ifs invaded my mind, screaming their terrible fates. Pushed against my seat by the force of takeoff and an awful worry, I wondered what if this is it?
That same series played out before each trip I took over the following years, barely ebbing in its fervor.
Love at it’s worst has felt for me, nearly unbearable. In the dark days following a breakup, it has felt absolutely nauseating to miss one person so badly, to be without them, to hurt existentially.
And yet, love at its best, at its most euphoric, which I have recently been fortunate enough to experience, carries that same element of disbelief. How can I feel this strongly for somebody? How can I bare it? Will my heart not swell and burst? Will I not be ruined for all eternity?
It is a sensation that has warped my sense of being. At alternating times flooring and emboldening me. It has made me feel detached from myself, as though a stationary being hurtling through time, making the rest of the world seem blurry and irrelevant. It has filled me as though I am a conduit of and for wonder. Cinema and science fiction. Magic and fate. Unbelievable and inescapable.
It is trippy.
And that is scary. Because it is scary to love someone that much. To know you have reached some sort of nexus which the only escape from… is loss. It breeds a rapid evolution of fears. To worry what might happen to them. To think about how fragile our lives are. To wonder how we have allowed ourselves to care so deeply for this one person.
That time at the hotel pool in Thailand was part of a two-week trip we took there recently. We have traveled quite a lot in our short years together, but this was our longest and most exotic trip yet.
That kind of distance from my daily life lent me a perspective I had been unable to see for some time.
Any new environment heightens one’s awareness of their surroundings. You sense everything different and everything the same. You notice other travelers who look like you, who speak your language, who seem to be a reflection of you in one sense or another.
On this trip we saw so many couples like us, Americans, traveling together, some on their honeymoon, most not. With no phone to distract me, I spent so much time at restaurants, bars and hotel pools watching how these couples interacted. How they argued or showed affection, held hands or walked alone. How they cautiously trod this land in which they had just arrived or been in for some time.
It made me think of the backpacking trips I had taken by myself in my early 20s. In countries around the world, I would wander cities with my possessions on my back and a guidebook in my hand, for anywhere from 2 weeks to a month at a time.
Always looking for connection.
Always looking for the pretty girls. Always wanting to meet somebody new and have an incredible experience and a story to tell. Always trying to latch onto another couple or group to provide the connection I so deeply craved.
Wondering how to bridge the gap between me and them. Wondering what to say to them, wishing so hard I could have a beautiful girl to hold hands with in a train station. From 22 to 27 I always traveled alone, I didn’t understand the mechanics of finding a travel partner of such intimacy. The little boy romantic in me pined hard.
By 27 I stopped planning trips by myself. I was tired of doing it alone. I was no longer looking for the solo experience of disappearing in a foreign land, but of having a memory I could share with somebody instead of just myself. Travelling on my own no longer felt exciting, it felt lonely.
All of that constantly ran through my head as I watched these couples in Thailand. And I always ended up looking at the woman next to me with such gratitude.
Travelling with somebody for so long allows you to see them in a different light. Every day is filled with new environments allowing you to be both participant and observer. You watch your partner fumble through a language barrier. They watch you read a map and divine a course of action. You watch them make friends with people you would never think to talk to. They watch you lose your ATM card the minute you arrive in the country.
The best moments though, are the ones when your partner doesn’t realize you are watching them.
On a flight we took from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, my girlfriend and I were separated into two security lines twenty feet apart. And as I watched her wait her turn to load her bag on to the conveyor belt, a feeling I had wanted for over a decade rushed over me.
The pretty girl over there, traveling in the same country as me, going about her business, wasn’t just somebody I wished to know. She was here with me. As if by magic, it had happened. I had suddenly mentally arrived in the place I physically was. Puzzle pieces of my life and the world around me snapped into place with incredible precision, contextualizing everything I was and had always wanted.
I was once again standing by myself in a foreign country. But I wasn’t alone.
I was in love.
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