dishevelled elegance | falling hard in love

What Is it about the in-love or the newly in-love that makes them so awkward, yet so elegant in their way. How they seem all elbows, knees and ankles, leaning conspiratorially over tables, having conversations about nothing, about everything, comparing palms and making eye-contact meaning with eyes that gleam in some way that is obvious to all others and if we are in love too then it makes us smile and recall our own beginnings and if not, then we see those others whose bile seems to rise and who seem to practically spit with yellow-green hatred and think such things as “get a room” when a perfectly normal kiss is passed between lovers at a café table.

This much is so normal to me. Haven’t we all been there. Are we there? Are we still there? Or is it a place we simply revisit from time to time , remembering and revisiting the way one revisits a childhood or summer romance that had us swirling and swinging high over the city lights and it left us dizzied but unconcerned.

As I made my way around the city recently, I saw not so many such couples but a few,but perhaps not so many because my own mind is occupied and I myself and among the elbows-knees-and ankles crowd ~ the geeky and awkward. The all- too shy and that, no matter how many years now may go by, there is always an initial shyness barrier that must be broken (for me) before anything else can happen. But this is just me, because I know you find this hard to believe, but believe it, I am quite shy (yes, yes, you buy into some façade, some projection of who you believe me to be… but can’t you see, but I digress).

These newly in-love, or the in-love, the the falling, yes the falling that is the word I am looking for, the enfants maudits, for they are indeed damned, damned to fall into an exquisite love and yes, hurt will be part of that equation at times but it will be unlike any they have ever known before. It will be exquisite if they are fortunate. The sound of a fine violin partita ~ thin and reedy and perfectly played yet with the rich undertones of a cello, That is love: complex, yet worth the risk for the real deal.

I caught a glimpse of myself the other day as I passed by a shop window and I looked disheveled in my pleated skirt and my hair coming unloosed from it’s bun and my blouse coming untucked and me carrying far too much and yet I had never seen myself appear more elegant in some ways. It was disheveled elegance, that had grace all it’s own. It was then that I knew for certain I had fallen, hard, and again.

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