In a time when we are hurtling towards time-poverty, where things happen at a super-fast timescale, I would like to share something old-fashioned about deep connection with another person and the universe.
January 2017
Upon seeing this sunset from my balcony, we grabbed our picnic food, stuffed it into an old rucksack, and raced 600m to the beach. I think we were smiling as we walked single-file along the busy road leading to the seafront, amidst the traffic and pedestrians living their lives on the streets. I wanted to turn around and tell him this: “I am so incredibly happy to be with you.”
At the beach, just when the world was beginning to turn dusky pink by the setting sun, we fell into step next to each other and held hands. I love holding his hand. A thousand magical things happen whenever his fingers reach for mine.
We found a spot somewhere on the beach and laid down the picnic blanket. It was my old horse blanket, all tatty and memorable, but this was one of the rare occasions I did not think about my home in the Shires. I was here, fully present with this man who lit some long-buried fire in me.
As we sat down, his arms went round me and I moulded my body to his. I could feel him kissing my hair softly. Though the cloud had come in by now and obscured the display, we were lost in the beauty of the moment.
Until I broke the enchantment and moved away from him. ‘Your back,” I said. “You’ll strain your back bearing my weight.”
He was spooning me whilst sitting upright. And I thought about the spinous fibres of his erector spinae dancing alongside his spine, and his quadratus lumborum supporting my weight. He smiled teasingly at me – only a crazy woman would think about erector spinae and quadratus lumborum in a romantic moment like this – but he followed my lead anyway. We moved to a better spot. We found a tree that was just right for us, as its trunk concaved into a hollow into which his back fitted perfectly. I relaxed again, thinking about him in yoga class, on the mat beside me.
An aeon ago, before he became this special person to me, he had been a deeply familiar system of biological parts, subject to my mental dissection and intellectual exercise. He had entered my consciousness as a familiarity, and from then on, he weaved his individual and personalised magic in me. But I had thought about his body long before then, visualised its internal workings. I saw the architectural wonders of his body in my mind’s eye before I even first kissed his skin.
And here he was now, holding me in this enchanted space. He was touching my upper arm softly, like he was tracing the intricate network of arteries, veins and capillaries beneath my skin, subcutaneous layer, connective tissues and muscles. “So soft,” he breathed, watching my face in the fading light. At that moment in time, I thought it was the most perfect moment ever. The world around us faded into a distant blur – the Russian tourists, the Chinese chatter, the beach dogs, the whole world. All that was left was just he and I alone in this vast and magical universe.
It was as if some deep part of me was waiting for this man to breathe fire into my inner being. His molecules – the signature of his essence – somehow fitted in the intricate 3-D molecular structures within me, catalysing a waterfall of beautiful reactions. It is said that emotions arise from the synapses in the brain, but I am not so sure. I felt a visceral reaction deep within me at the taste of him.
We ate goat’s cheese and sundried tomatoes. And sticky mango rice. I tasted that on his lips, his tongue, his saliva, and felt all the parts of me that was capable of expressing joy coming alive, coming to glorious life.
And reading the book by Sophie Sabbage about the art of living on borrowed time, I thought, how exquisite it is to feel and to love deeply. Indeed, we don’t ‘fall’ in love. We rise. We are more, not less, of ourselves in its presence. We are uplifted, not laid low.
And thus we live; we really live.
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