Remember how as a kid love was easy and you’d just see someone and that was enough? Or seeing someone different, someone you saw every day, and then just something altered and an ache in you that was love.
Like a girl I sat beside for almost a year in school and she was just a girl, small and pocket-sized, and she wore a grey cardigan like all the rest, and her hair all dark and dropping, and she bit her lip or her pencil when she was concentrating, and she smelled of lemons from the soap she used – but you had to be sitting close to know that. And one day I caught her in a shaft of sunlight, like God was maybe pointing his golden finger at her so I would see, and I loved her then.
Or once, in the street, and I had some years on me by then, or I thought I did; and I was just minding my business and not really thinking about nothing. And then she was there, like a thunderclap to my heart. And she was beautiful and she did not know that she was. And it was a moment is all. A girl in the window of the bus and she saw me, too, a connection of sorts. Then gone and never seen again. And I looked for that girl for years, in a thousand bus windows I looked, and looking felt like love.
But you grow out of that kind of love. You have to it. They expect you to. And they laugh at that kind of love – that hit-and-run love, that snatched-out-of-the-air love, that fly-by-night love. Love has to be something more grown up now. That’s what they tell you. It has to have heart and soul – which just goes to show the little they understood of how a boy loves.
And so I tether my heart and we all do. And I choose to sit in the same chair, year on year, and the same girl growing to old beside me, and she furrows her brow when she’s concentrating and purses her lips like she’s holding pins, and she smells of coconut and mango if you get close enough – which are smells I would not even have known as a boy. And I look at her, look for the shafted light of God’s finger pointing to her. And waiting is part of love, too, they say.
Then today, and I passed a billboard, and there was a picture of a woman I sort of recognized. And she’s an actress I have seen in something and she has a new film out called ‘True Story’. Her name is Felicity and that means ‘happiness’, and she stops me dead – but in that moment I feel I am more alive than before – and she has the most beautiful lips, I swear she has; and there in the street, like thunderclaps, and my heart is untied and I ache inside. And it feels like bus-window love, but I am too old for that now, and maybe that is the real ache.
Patricia Ann McNair 
Remember how as a kid love was easy and you’d just see someone and that was enough? Or seeing someone different, someone you saw every day, and then just something altered and an ache in you that was love.
Like a girl I sat beside for almost a year in school and she was just a girl, small and pocket-sized, and she wore a grey cardigan like all the rest, and her hair all dark and dropping, and she bit her lip or her pencil when she was concentrating, and she smelled of lemons from the soap she used – but you had to be sitting close to know that. And one day I caught her in a shaft of sunlight, like God was maybe pointing his golden finger at her so I would see, and I loved her then.
Or once, in the street, and I had some years on me by then, or I thought I did; and I was just minding my business and not really thinking about nothing. And then she was there, like a thunderclap to my heart. And she was beautiful and she did not know that she was. And it was a moment is all. A girl in the window of the bus and she saw me, too, a connection of sorts. Then gone and never seen again. And I looked for that girl for years, in a thousand bus windows I looked, and looking felt like love.
But you grow out of that kind of love. You have to it. They expect you to. And they laugh at that kind of love – that hit-and-run love, that snatched-out-of-the-air love, that fly-by-night love. Love has to be something more grown up now. That’s what they tell you. It has to have heart and soul – which just goes to show the little they understood of how a boy loves.
And so I tether my heart and we all do. And I choose to sit in the same chair, year on year, and the same girl growing to old beside me, and she furrows her brow when she’s concentrating and purses her lips like she’s holding pins, and she smells of coconut and mango if you get close enough – which are smells I would not even have known as a boy. And I look at her, look for the shafted light of God’s finger pointing to her. And waiting is part of love, too, they say.
Then today, and I passed a billboard, and there was a picture of a woman I sort of recognized. And she’s an actress I have seen in something and she has a new film out called ‘True Story’. Her name is Felicity and that means ‘happiness’, and she stops me dead – but in that moment I feel I am more alive than before – and she has the most beautiful lips, I swear she has; and there in the street, like thunderclaps, and my heart is untied and I ache inside. And it feels like bus-window love, but I am too old for that now, and maybe that is the real ache.