In honor of Valentine's Day ~ 'She fell in Love' - short story

She fell in love.


On a rainy Autumn day she fell in love with him.  They talked and held hands and her heart was broken by her capacity to love him. He smiled into her eyes and said he loved her, and she cried when he left, closing out the afternoon with a torrential storm of tears. She took her limping heart tenderly home and earnestly tried to forget what she felt, filling the days and hours and minutes with everything but him. But always the tug, always the sense of something just missed.

Do you know the kind of love that tugs at the deepest part of your heart, slows it’s beating, and turns it into an achingly beautiful sonnet written just for you?

Have you wandered through the dark of the night, your love consuming you, your chest rising and falling to the rhythm of its melody as it washes over you in powerful dreamlike waves? Have you reasoned with it, analyzed it, twisted and contorted it, asking in vain for release?

In the Spring she tried to tell him how she felt, but her natural capacity to express herself failed her and he just smiled teasingly, unknowingly; He was lightness itself when it came to this love of hers, like a feather floating up and around the subject without actually landing and settling on anything. This should have been torture for her, but by this point he had become a dear friend and she realized that what he had to share with her, whatever that was, must be enough.

Years passed.

She is older and sure of herself, bursting with self-knowledge and control, her patchwork heart tucked deeply within the protective exterior of those mocked-up defenses called ‘maturity’.

So they meet again and he is much the same, funny and guarded and lonely. Still, there is a brittle transparency about him that was not there before, and she feels that tug, compelled to soothe him, comfort him, love him.  Involuntarily his heart reaches out to hers and asks for what he is missing.

She sees him, you know. She does. So strong and careful, so resilient, yet she sees how empty he is in this moment and her heart turns, wrenched with tenderness.

She fell in love with him in the Autumn and she loves him still. Her hand is out, extended, and if he likes she will walk with him a quiet while until he is restored, her dear, dear friend.