on love

who's in a good mood today? josh folger, that's who. the weather this morning walking to the subway was just perfect: no wind, no humidity, sun, maybe just over 60 degrees. just a sublime pre-fall morning. makes someone like me wish he were running--fast, feeling the vacant hollow air as he creates his own headwind, getting warm, sweating a little but not ridiculously, only so much that the manufactured breeze just slightly chills his clammy skin. just perfect.
someone here at work spilled a cup of coffee in front of the reception desk and i was helping clean it up and now the fingertips of my right hand smell like gingerbread cookies. i'm not going to wash them until absolutely necessary.
a girl came into the F train this morning and occupied the seat directly below where i was standing and reading a printed six-page article concerning the poor season of Atlanta Braves centerfielder Andruw Jones. even within the glaze of usual morning fogginess, the subway blank stare phenomenon, and the absorption of reading materials, a man can always instinctively recognize exactly when a very attractive woman boards a train in his vicinity. he is always thus instantly snapped out of meditation into anticipation. i can't really compare this to anything else; quite surely nature is full of analagous involuntary events, what with the universal dispossession of large swaths of minutae-filled, distracted human brain power. anyway, this girl/woman was certainly attractive, and she chose to sit right in front of me, directly behind my studious (you can "study" baseball) field of vision.
more about the girl now: she was maybe 5'8" or 9" in normal heels, she had short very black very smooth hair that fell around her face like parentheses, she was on the skinny side but not annoyingly so, she had smallish facial features, beautifully lush lips, and a mouth that didn't quite seem to close all the way as she read, and she had a marvellously dark and textured skin, as if the richness of the color produced the smoothness of its texture. all in all, but mostly judging on the skin color, she had the look of a Thai or Vietnamese or even New Guinean person. somewhere southeast asian, most likely. actually her skin had definite olive tones as well, and so maybe she could be Egyptian or Persian or that type. i'm not sure. the important thing to know is that the sum of her was beauty--reserved, graceful, dignified, effortless, and comfortable beauty.
why do i now spend so much time on this girl (it's now been longer in the recounting than the actual time spent admiring this morning)? because she taught me something about love.
when your senses are attuned correctly, it's very easy to fall in love. i suppose i'm cheating by adding that qualifier, but it's really much easier to fall for someone than nearly everyone in this world would have you believe.
i think i fell in love with that girl this morning in just the five to ten minutes we shared a piece of physical existence. i think that this could happen relatively often, and i don't think there is any shame in this, or that it renders more meaningless any previous emotional relationships you or i or anyone may have had. the difference is in the next step: the communication; if you can carry over that initial burst of emotive joy into discussion with a person, then you're starting to go places. and if that then carries over into physicality, and then into comfort, and then into some kind of effortless mutual existence, and so on, well then you've got all you need, the only person you'll ever need (i won't say "wife" cause marriage is silly and arbitrary). so of course all those progressive steps are important, but perhaps the first step, not simply the attraction but the production of love, is the most important. and it's the easiest to achieve, by far. isn't that wonderful?
thank you girl on the subway. thank you whatever put me in the right status of being. thank you to all the numerous future Aphrodites in my life.