Paper Lovers
We didn’t speak at our first meeting. He wore orange trousers & skulked in a corner. I was the life of the party in pinstripes. Irony clinked glasses all around. I discovered he had a blog & I visited from my anonymous account. It was much better than the one by the guy I’d been argue-flirting with at the party.
For six months, we went back & forth between our blogs, trading witticisms in comments, life lessons in posts, smiles in shared references, winks in poetry.
“We should discuss this over coffee or a glass of wine” read a comment on my blog one Friday. He wanted to breach the digital wall. I pretended it hadn’t happened.
Monday, the sentence was the title of his new blogpost. The post said, “I left this comment on her blog two days ago. This is to let her know the invitation is still open.” It was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen. No one else knew about this & yet it was out there. ‘Hiding in plain sight’ could have been the title had I written an autobiography then.
He introduced me to Milan Kundera. And I fell in love. With the part of me that is made of words & that wields them like a magic wand, creating lives out of thin air.
Our dates would be bourgeois. Wine tastings, my interruptions at the pretentions, his frown at my reactions, our mutual jokes about our self-awareness. He’d serenade me with a pop song. Later he’d write about us in poetry. He was in love too. With the stories he wanted to create. Like French cinema, he once wrote, is the background score of my life.
We parted with no acrimony but plenty of drama. Everything is possible between people of words. Like pages fluttering in a breeze & then tearing free of the book, we drifted away to be part of other stories. I became a paper plane. But I was once a paper lover.
I sometimes think of him when I open Milan Kundera. I hear his voice saying “I’m more interesting on my blog then in real life.” Writers often are.
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