Valentine's 2010: #6

The setting: arts school. We are high school seniors with only two weeks left in this tiny place, and it is here that I will learn how to fall in love. The characters: a writer and a ballerina, both snobs in their respective fields, both with an over-active imagination.

She escapes from her classmates into a Jane Austen novel only to see her own Mr. Willoughby when she glances up from it; his eyes bright with the words of Seamus Heaney: "You are neither here nor there," he would later say about that moment, "A hurry through which known and strange things pass / As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways / And catch the heart off guard and blow it open."

This is how he came and how he left; the poem he gave me, he had given to others before. But we never spot an anti-hero until it is too late. I play my favorite song for him, "Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under?"

"Is that a subliminal message?" he asks laughing. I wonder at his guilty conscience, but he begins to tell me stories of his childhood, and all is forgotten.

He lived in a mobile home with his dimwit parents, scoundrel older brother and the sweetest little sister. She was his only friend. Every day after school they would stop at the public library and escape into all kinds of books. He wanted to know the stories. He wanted to know the poet, not the poetry. Then he began to write. Little sister helped. Together they created a world of characters with such a whirlwind of defects you couldn't help but love them. With these, he seduced both himself and me.

Graduation came soon, and off I flew to the City of Lights where I wrote two weeks' worth of love letters home. He dragged his feet in the sand, contemplating the vastness of the ocean between us while discovering the expanse of his love for me. It was expanse, not depth, for that is just where our Willoughby would fall short: "You caught my heart off guard and blew it open," he said. We are both still blind.

And when he finally did run, surrendering to a more worldly impetus, I was left there on the banks of the Seine in my imagination. He packed up his love and left me, but I hid away something he never knew he'd given me. As soon as he was gone, I began to write, too. I stole away with his words, and I never looked back.