Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another.

Falling in love, we said. I fell for him. we were falling women.we believed in it, this downward motion; so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time, so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. god is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. the more difficult is was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. we were waiting, as always, for the incarnation. that word, made flesh.

and sometimes it happened, for a time. that kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. you would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been so evasive about it, at the time.

there is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

or sometimes, when you were still loving, still falling, you'd wake up in the middle of the night, when the moonlight was coming through the window onto his sleeping face, making the shadows in the sockets of his eyes darker and more cavernous than in day time, and you'd think, who knows what they do, on their own or with other men? who knows what they say or where they are likely to go? who can tell what they really are? under their daily-ness. likely you would think at those times; what if he doesn't love me?

but all of that was pertinent only in the night, and had nothing to do with the man you loved, at least in daylight. with that man you wanted it to work, to work out. maybe you would be able to work it out together, as if the two of you were a puzzle that could be solved; otherwise, one of you, most likely the man, would go wandering off on a trajectory of his own, taking his addictive body with him and leaving you with bad withdrawl. if you didnt work it out it was because one of you had the wrong attitude. everything that went on in your life was thought to be due to some positive or negative power eminating from inside your head.

if you don't like it, change it, we said to each other and to ourselves. and so we would change the man, for another one. change, we were sure, was for the better always. we were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.