One Trip Becomes Two

So I basically fell in love July 13th. But it took a while for me to accept it, integrate it into my awareness and begin to understand it. How we see a meteor flash across the sky, white, purple, magenta, orange, white again, green, magenta. Then for years we try to figure out what that blaze might have stood for, or we tell the story again and again. "Once, I was standing outside at the perfect time, and I saw this incredible fireball cross the sky. It blazed white, purple, magenta, orange, white again, green, magenta. Most amazing thing." 

We try to catch up with anything that happens at light speed in our lives. In particular, I have some control strategies that include trying to shape a narrative. It can't be possible to fall in love so deeply, passionately, thoroughly and devastatingly in one day. It just can't. There has to be more of a narrative. It's not really a story. "I started flirting with this woman and things took off from there and by the end of the day I was in love with her." What kind of story is that? And how weirdly vulnerable and irrational does that mean I am? And what happened to all of my common sense?

It's easier for us to accept sudden occurrences that somehow don't involve us directly. Like, one minute we are driving along peacefully and the next minute we get broadsided by another car. No one would ever say "Ha! Not possible! It must have happened more slowly than that!" 

We also insist on a distinction between the real world and the virtual world. So part of my reluctance to accept that I had fallen in love with this person so quickly was that our interactions happened via text. We can accept that literature and poetry are wicked powerful and that in general the written word is capable of changing the world. Hell, alcoholics at death's door even get sober and stay that way simply from reading the Big Book. So my reluctance to lend credence to my own powerful feelings is particularly interesting, given the fact that I am a believer in the word.

Another reason it seemed impossible is that our interactions went from 0 to 120 in one day, erotically. I retain some of the old, dumb duality of sex versus love, and it seemed astonishing to me that my heart could be so in love within the context of such an erotic interaction. I went into it looking for an experimental kind of connection via erotica. No way that could lead to falling in love. Not possible. 

Also, she's unavailable. Impractical. Complicated. And it was "too soon" after the breakup. And "I'm not done processing." And I had *just started* going to CoDA meetings before the trip. And and and. 

Pascals surprisingly applicable aphorism kept repeating in my mind. Except, in Spanish, because I had learned it from a wall in San Ignacio, Baja Sur.

I piled into the car and headed out of Long Beach Island, bound for a visit with an old friend/former lover in Maryland, who I hadn't seen in 30 years. But I was bringing a brand new person with me on the trip. The wish to share parts of the experience had started suddenly with wanting her to hear the sound of the Ten Mile River in the dark. Now, on long stretches of meditative driving, in spite of my own disbelief, I started to think about telling her a lot more than that.