Cool Love

She’s like a cool breeze; the kind you feel walking barefoot along a quiet shoreline, sand between your toes, the waves coming in and out to soak them. She’s an air sign (Libra), so go figure. I’m utterly captured by her; she fascinates me. Yet at this stage of life, it’s a different kind of love. I don’t find myself doing cartwheels or buzzing with giddiness day after day. It’s more lived-in, more deeply embedded in me. I feel like I’ve found her.

Love’s a funny thing. I can faintly remember falling in my early twenties; the deep emotional gravity of it. Sometimes it felt like being on a roller coaster, other times like mid-flight turbulence. Love was the strongest possible dose, giving a liberating “handbrake off” feeling. It was the surest way to feel truly alive.

At my current  life stage, that “handbrake off” feeling has fundamentally lost its appeal. I’m looking for someone to live life shoulder to shoulder with; someone who possesses a firm degree of emotional maturity. I’m not seeking to become thoroughly interwoven with another person, so we present as one being with two heads. I want to be climbing my own mountain, and let the qualities that radiate from that complement my partner. Standing shoulder to shoulder with her makes the world feel wide and conquerable. There aren’t enough superlatives to tell you how much she complements me. 

I didn’t expect her. I wanted her. She has an open-eyed earnestness about her: not naïveté. The finest couture velvet glove delicately wraps an iron fist. She is grounded, “real” as it’s colloquially said, and confidently possesses her own voice. Yet she knows how and when to use it. Her charm has a warm, understated gentleness — and wouldn’t you know it — it’s light as air.

On the subject of eyes: hers are the most feline I’ve ever seen. While this is no complaint, I’d argue she’s guilty of hypnosis. Her beauty is entirely magnetic to me. But I’m only enamoured by the radiant spirit that beholds it. Maybe it’s how she throws back her head to laugh that makes her beautiful. Maybe it’s her appetite for mischief. Maybe it’s her ability to see everything through a lens of positivity. Take your pick; I don’t mind. They’re all mine.

We’ve wondered why it took us so long to come into each other’s lives. I don’t have any other answer than a one-liner: I had a lot of growing up to do. A cosmic sense of things leads me to feel my hardships were all worthwhile trials to make me ready for her. Not someone to get high or drunk on, but someone precious to cherish and count my blessings for.

I’m grateful — and wary, vigilant even. She is a gift to me: an opposite who only attracts. Someone so different from me, with intricate footnotes of the rarest symmetry. She offers what I hoped finding someone was: not someone as an escape from life, but a person to live a life with.

I don’t always get to see her. We rolled the dice on quality over quantity. Adhering to wisdom may just be making something of us: no moment is wasted, and we only look forward to more. Though she is not all that  far from my place. I may stop by on a midweek evening, day done — not an effort left for anything or anyone. Yet a chance to see that face, to hold her hand, for a kiss goodnight… this is weightless, humming with sparks of electricity.

So sure, I’m not strapped to a rollercoaster and I’m not forty thousand feet in the air with my stomach plunging. I’m feeling the sand between my toes and a cool, gentle breeze on a beautiful beach somewhere. The sun shines on me and everything around, promising a most glittering, breathtaking horizon.