2002-02-26 - 11:01 p.m.
What do I love.
I love The Girl. I love The Girl. I love how when she tells stories she slips into a drawl that takes me home and wraps around me and holds me close and in love all at once. I love that smell of her that means warmth and passion and flannel sheets in the winter and she knows how to start a fire and jump a battery. And she whispers to me sometimes. And sometimes she looks up at me from the bed and she's mine and I'm hers and I love that.
The Girl is a female version of an English gentleman who grew up in Virginia. She keeps the Book of Common Prayer on her study table because she wants to believe what's in it. And if it's that close to her, then maybe it will sink into her soul the way she craves it to do.
I love how she buys Entemann's cakes and tries. Really really really hard. To not eat the whole thing. She makes a point of saving a piece for me. I love that.
She likes the same music I do and she looks amazing in a leather jacket. When we go someplace nice she puts on mascara and I know it was for me and I love that. The Girl buys big shirts from Bob's Discount stores and they look wonderful on her. She likes yellow ones. She's letting her hair grow out and I find that charming. She wants to pick her own patron saint, but she only focuses on the men and only on the apostles because she wants "one of the big guys".
I didn't mean to put this much love into her. I didn't mean to love her this much. I didn't mean to fall this in love. I didn't mean it. I meant to put up a wall of Boston to New York. I meant to be in New York. I didn't mean to fall in love. I didn't want to get sappy about someone's smell or her flannel sheets. I didn't want to find her ability to learn card games online and teach them to me over drinks at a Boston pub. Beautiful.
But it is.
I didn't mean. Really. To ever care this much for any one person who could seriously. And I mean seriously. Not just in a "it was hard to leave him" sort of way. But seriously mess me up should she ever decide that she doesn't really love me which I think is not ever going to happen and I pray it doesn't and I light candles to my Patron Saint because I'm pretty sure she's protected me thus far because she's one of the Big Guys and I wear mascara and The Girl likes my hair and my nails and the way I read to her and the way I drive and make money and find a career and make new friends and love on the old ones and I think. I really think this is going to work out. In one of those long-time work out kind of ways. Because I love her. and I really honestly believe and think and feel that she loves me too.
And there's the fact of the matter that she always. Tries really really really hard. To save me at least one piece. Of the Entemann's Cake.
***
A monument to me.
There used to be this statue of a man sitting on a park bench near the WTC. It was made in the 1970s, and the man was opening a briefcase on his lap. You could see in the briefcase, all these things. Like this huge calculator. For some reason I used to search the statue out all the time.
I first met him the first month I lived in Manhattan. And I said goodbye to him when I left the WTC the last time. After the attacks, there was a picture in one of the papers of him. He had been blown off his bench, but was still intact. People came and left flowers and notes on him.
I don't know what kind of monument would mean *me*. What it should say. What kind of permanance it'd have.
I think maybe just a park bench out at Coney Island. One of those on the boardwalk in front of the Cyclone roller coaster.
Maybe a bronze "statue" of a bunch of daisies. With a little inscription that said, "The only thing we're meant to do is to live. That's it. Just live. L'Chaim."
