My husband didn’t mind. Not because he’s particularly keen on us having sharesies with others, but because I didn’t fall in love with another man. Or a woman. I fell in love with many men and women. All of them, in fact.
Well, that’s an exaggeration. The one skateboarding scammer trying to get me to give him my cell phone to make an emergency call elicited my loudest “back off” voice and clearly enunciated, unambiguous recommendation he ask someone in the museum behind me to use their phone. Within seconds, he was skateboarding down the sidewalk, heading toward another possible mark; I guess the emergency passed. So for this guy, not so much love was evoked. But I sure loved my response.
And that’s another thing. I fell in love with myself. With life and the way I live it.
With my jokes, my sense of humor, the way certain colors and shapes seem to expand in my chest, the way I talk to paintings in galleries, the way I allow myself to make bad sketches in front of some of the world’s most renowned masterpieces and don’t at all feel like I’m cheapening the work, the artist, the museum or myself. The way I can walk and walk and walk, headphones to my internet radio station in place, bopping along as if I own the place, rather than being a newcomer, traveler, foreigner. With all the things I thought I might like to do or see or taste or hear and then it turns out I do love those things. With some things I’m not even sure I liked, but the chance to do them was sufficiently likeable, so I did them and liked them. I danced to music I would never have danced to – it wasn’t particularly good and I was alone, with no one to dance with. But I shifted out of my initial discomfort, realized it was an opportunity to dance, to not care what I looked like if my arms or legs or head was moving in any particularly goofy direction because I didn’t know anyone there, and wouldn’t, and so the possibilities for embarrassment were 0, and in fact I wasn’t alone because everyone on that dance floor was part of something bigger than their individual selves and relationships. I danced and danced and laughed and smiled and sweated and danced. I didn’t buy the group’s CD; the music wasn’t really something I’d ever put on. But if I ever hear strains of something like it, I’m pretty sure I’m going out on the floor to move.
I spoke to strangers, probably intrusively, given that they were, by definition, having their own private moments and conversations. I simply inserted myself into others’ relational sphere and found, to my amazement, that the “other” was pretty darned welcoming of me. Perhaps they would have preferred a happy Labrador retriever intrude in their privacy more than a happy traveler, but their emotional and conversational scritches made me wag my tail.
I flirted, in the broadest sense of the word, with everyone I met. I assumed their ultimate goodness and that my next moments would be made richer for having their attention. I basked in their attention and reflected it right back, not just with my eyes or conversation, but with the palpable evidence of love – a fat, generous tip from a deep sense of love-soaked generosity – I had an abundance to share.
I was fully, hopelessly, wildy in love. It was magic. Things happened that shouldn’t happen, merely because of being in the right place at the right time. I felt lucky. I ate scrumptious food and didn’t gain an ounce. I had boundless energy and ideas and everything was in a flow. I loved my destinations the way we all love early in an infatuation – with grandeur and gratitude and the boastful smugness of how perfectly matched we, my destination loves and I were, our destiny, our perfect, encapsulated moment.
I had a few pangs of guilt that I was having a love affair with life and that my husband was missing out on it. But not enough to haul back a single moment of immersive delight. Our marriage was never in jeopardy. My travel love didn’t need to be consummated in the arms or bed of another individual – I consummated it with each sculpture, each painting, each new place I visited, each new restaurant I tried, each time I smiled my biggest smile and had the ability to make another person smile all the way to their eyes.
I could have gone on like that forever.
But alas, the trip came to an end.
I came home still in the glow. Told lots of stories. Showed some pictures. Effused. Bubbled. Got wide eyed. Made some choices to do things out of my usual routine.
I came home in love, and it spilled right over and out of me. I fell in love again with my husband and my marriage and my son and my regular life – even though I’d never fallen out of love with them – and decided that perhaps we can choose to fall in love any time we want. Life (aka, life out there) and my life and marriage do not have to compete for my love – there’s enough of me to go around, and I’m happy to go sharesies with him and the whole wide world of aliveness.
I hope I keep choosing to fall in love, keep making it happen, keep getting up to dance every chance I get even if no one I know will dance with me. Because I’m not really dancing alone. I’ll be on that dance floor with a bunch of other people I just haven’t met yet, who would be perfectly happy sharing a sliver of their life with someone who’s giddy in love.