I was sitting on the steps in Piazza San Marco and behind me, a family asked a man to take their picture for them. I heard his voice, and I couldn't move. I have no idea what it was but I KNEW it was important, imperative. And somehow, for no reason, we got talking, sitting there on the steps, total strangers.
He was just a middle aged man in a bandana, a nice face but nothing remarkable, no reason for me to be bowled over. I was a chubby 19 year old idiot. We had almost nothing in common. But we looked at each other and something happened and we both knew it was happening and we neither of us knew what it was. It was absolutely exhilirating, it felt like all the rest of my life I'd only been using one valve of my heart and suddenly the other one was open. No-one else has ever made me feel quite like that, although I have loved many people in many ways.
We spent that weekend together, and a couple of other weekends in foreign cities over about a decade. Probably spent less than a week actually physically in each others' presence in total. We wrote each other so many letters. We never slept together. We came close to it, once, but I had a boyfriend at the time. We haven't spoken in years, probably because of that time when nothing happened but probably should have. I think about him every day, in spite of my sensible, good life and my family. I will probably think about him every day when I'm a wrinkly old lady and he is long dead (and I'll never know if he is or he isn't).
I have loved so many people. But I still think that might have been the only time I was 'in love', in the poems and songs sense. I wonder if to count as being 'in love' it needs to be like that - irrational, overpowering, a shock - like being plunged into cold water. I wonder if I would still feel that way about him if there had been more than a handful of moments, if there had been a life. Common sense says probably not; but was it common sense when I simply heard a voice behind me and the world stopped spinning?
Love's a funny old thing!