I wasn’t looking for him. I didn’t even know what “him” I was looking for. He could have been the nervous-looking busboy at the coffee shop on Thursday, the one with tousled brown hair the color of the spilled latte he was wiping up. Or maybe he was the owner of the piercing green eyes staring into Les Miserables in the far corner of the bookstore. Perhaps he was the leather coat. Maybe the faded, torn backpack. But then he could have been the hooded jacket, the bicycle, the blur. I didn’t know, I didn’t want to know, I wasn’t looking for him. I’d given up on love. I’d given up on the idea of love and on the possibility of love. I became a cynic. A horrible cynic, finding the doubt and distortion in everything. Fairytale endings became a lie spoon-fed to children and believers to instill a sense of hope and wonderment against a grey, stark, desolate world. I knew that the world was too bland for a stone castle and far too busy to glance down for a lost shoe. It was all true and it was true because romanticism went out of style with vinyl records. Love went out of style long before that even. Lovers walking the street, hand-in-hand were simply masking the pain and blandness through ignorance. An ignorance that was inherent in society today. So much that a sense of true justice was a rare jewel glistening in the cracks of that busy sidewalk. But there he was.
I’m not getting married, he said. Love is a lie. It doesn’t exist. It’s a conspiracy fed to the gullible. I’ve given up on love, I said. It doesn’t exist. It’s a fairytale. He took my hand into his tanned one and we walked along the busy street. And as we walked, we talked. We talked of life, of the idea of love, of the illusions of life hand-in-hand along the pavement. We smiled knowingly and cynically at the perfected images, we pondered the meaning of life and then we bashed it down, we discussed the possibilities of existence and together we crumbled the idea of such possibilities. Hand-in-hand we cursed at the world and all it held. We screamed at the blue-grey heavens until no more sound could be emitted. And in the forced silence we spoke magnitudes. Together we laughed maniacally at the idea of co-dependence and the trust that it encompassed. It couldn’t be, it could never last. The fantasies society fed to the innocent on a silver spoon were unimaginable and altogether unreachable. We argued about the sugar-coated lies. We ran wildly, hand-in-hand along the busy street dodging the friendly facades among the faces. We yelled with all the air on that smog filled day, gesticulating wildly as if that made the point any clearer.
.
That was when we fell in love.
