I don't remember a thing from when I fell in love. There are pointed moments, those times of the curtain billowing slowly and strikingly. Much like a drawer of trinkets have I kept memories. Inbetween the Oregon magnet and the personalized dogtags from the USS Hornet I keep the image of your lips on my elbow and beneath the photo your mother took of you in gel sandals next to a baby fawn I hold the strands of hair stuck to the back of your neck and forehead when you first wake up. Between the pages of the Roethke you bought me do I store the afternoons at the library, all the assorted smells on your breath (coffee, wine, sleep or stress) and every variation on your smile. All this, nearly a year in collection. A box never organized, a film with its audio slightly out of synch and the kind of grit seemingly all corners have. Just a messy drawer to anyone else. When did you fall in love? When was it you knew?

I could pick up any number of these articles. I could spell out the heartbreak and the jubilee and show them the Rothko and your tears. I could take them to the Chinese restaurant or the old classroom. I could show them the receipts and recorded transactions of my human heart and they would nod and smile. Our audience is a silly one and distracted and uninterested they would accept any one touching moment as the moment I fell in love.

But in truth, I don't know. I can't place it. It is like losing a limb in reverse. It is as if the miracle surgery for an amputee succeeded and a man who has spent most of his life waking in the middle of the night clawing at the arm he never had or retching from the pain he could never know, is suddenly healed and the wound he took as his life and spirit, truly the entire motion of his world is altered in one swift uncomprehendable turn of fortune.

So my love, my undeserved limb which I have ached for, which I have craved when I knew nothing else, cannot be isolated nor described in any adequate form. Some may counter and tell me that I was made to love you, that the construction of my heart was built for you. Again, it is not that simple. My conception, indeed my heart, began with you. My birth is my love for you and so to you belongs my life, my heart.