A few weeks ago, I received a letter in the mail from someone I do not know asking me to describe the act of falling in love. After much hesitation, I decided not to write him back. But I did write something. Here it is⎯

First, I would not call ‘falling’ in ‘love’ an act. An act implies that the thing being done is being done with intention, by acting consciously. Falling in love, in all its beautiful triteness, is not intentional, at least not at first. I don’t fall down the stairs on purpose, but I do feel something from it and I may throw myself down the stairs on purpose to re-create the original feeling.

I ‘fall’ in ‘love’ with the idea of you, with the movement of your body, with words you have learned elsewhere and strung together on a clothesline for me. Every moment that has accumulated in you and brought you to this moment where I am seeing you or hearing you or touching you is being effused. Your childhood, everywhere you once were, versions and past-lives, are all amalgamated here, now.

I fall in love with the incompleteness of you, with your unfinalizedness. With the knowledge that we are always becoming something we once were not. I see the route of your growth with a certain fog ahead and I want to go into this fog. I want to run into it with you, and if we lose each other in it, then so be it. I just know I want to be close to you.

Anything that happens after I realize I have ‘fallen’ in ‘love’ with you can be ended by consciousness of the realization of this. Consciousness of this realization may serve to obfuscate moments of their trueness. The falseness of interaction then may be agreed upon should both parties in ‘love’ understand this predicament. But still, moments together may not glow as they once did. A creative, ever-re-envisioning eye is needed, then.

I am thinking of a certain person as I write this. I am drawing from experience. I have come to know all of this only by doing it. Now, although still with much trepidation, we may call ‘falling’ in ‘love’ an act.

The strongest feeling I remember is one of the unexpected.  The unforeseeable. You who appear as if out of nowhere and change me without trying, without intention. We who meet here in a single moment for the first time, and then, again, again, again. I have come to need you in my life, and I know I did not before. I know I may not once more.