The Moment I Knew I Loved You

It was a chapter straight out of a Nicholas Sparks novel.

A scene straight out of a James Cameron movie.

Our hands melded together like a Michelangelo masterpiece.

It was that moment when you’re sitting at a red light waiting to make the left-hand turn. That moment when you finally notice the blinking yellow light from the car in front of you synchronize with the clicking from your own car, and all is right with the world. Like the moment I felt the sporadic, speeding pulses in our fingers begin to regulate and become completely regular and in sync.

It was a moment that I wanted to capture and preserve. Like a butterfly in a Mason jar. Like a firefly in the palms of my hands that glows between my fingers.

That moment, running my fingers up and down your forearm, the way one would run their fingers over a president’s authentic, personalized signature. I could feel your warm, silky skin, with the thinnest layer of peach fuzz tickling the tips of my fingers. It was hard for me to comprehend that there was ever a time I was not as content as this, and even harder to conceive that this feeling of complacency could ever vanish.

I studied your face the way an art major studies every brush stroke in a painting by Van Gogh. If only he could translate every detail onto a blank canvas and capture the magnificence before me in a single portrait. The kindness of your eyes: eyes that I looked into and saw two kids and a dog running around a house that would be too small for most, but that was just big enough for us. The red in your cheeks: red like the three-tier cake with two plastic figures set atop it. Your lips, just the slightest bit chapped, but nonetheless that looked so appealing to me: lips that did not let escape words that mine simply opened the floodgates for.

In this moment, Dave Matthews’ Crash Into Me was finally about real feelings that I had once become so cynical of. Feelings I didn’t believe actually existed. After so many passive listens, I finally heard the lyrics. And he was singing about us – this moment. This weak-at-the-knees moment.

In this moment, I understood all the clichés they used to tell me about fate. I even became less skeptical of poetry.

And Shakespeare made sense.

The language, the cognition of previously-assumed mindless characters finally all came together. I was finally able to grasp the concept of taking one’s own life to spend eternity with another.

In this moment, you forget that the Titanic sinks. You forget that there isn’t enough room in the life boat for both of you. You forget that this unsinkable ship just might try to take you down with it, separating you, pulling you so far under, forcing you to fight just to stay afloat. And when you do, you forget that there might not be room on the door for both of you, no matter what the skeptics say.

In this moment, you forget that the complete synchronization of the heartbeats that you once felt in your fingers could ever again become individual, divergent pulses. You forget that the red light is eventually going to turn green.

You forget that eventually you are going to have to set free this butterfly in a Mason jar. That this firefly just might cease to illuminate your glistening palms. That it might escape through the cracks in your fingers from which you once admired it.

You forget that Michelangelo’s masterpiece could fall and shatter into ten individual entities, devoid of any meaning.

I forgot while the crystals were forming in my hair and I swore to never let go, that you just might.

I forgot that Nicholas Sparks stories are just that – stories.