Category Archives: my last new york fiction

About the Possibility, Impossibility and Probability of Love

‘I just had the worst day of my life,’ she spoke leaning against a lantern pole. The light colored her face white and pink, her eyes looked bright and transparent like the water of the Mediterranean.
‘I am sorry to hear.’
‘No!’ she clamored as if I had just offended her. ‘I mean, everything today, from morning until the evening, got fucked up.’
‘I am sorry,’ I repeated and placed the back of my fingers against her soft cheek. She didn’t cry, she didn’t smile. She seemed fragile, but calm and unbroken, unbreakable. She looked at me with an angelic force. I did not know her, but she felt familiar.
‘This morning,’ she paused, continuing, ‘my family, it is a mess.’
I laughed a bit, out of discomfort perhaps. The absurdity of her disturbed statement simply appeared like an hilarious echo of my own perfect family. How disconnected and a world apart did the words family and mess sounded to me. The absolute normality of my upbringing, the devotional love of my parents and the unshakable security, I could imagine family to be boring at most. I could not control the emotional reflex and smile.

I stared at her glance that brightened her face. I was fascinated, a bit concerned. I trusted upon her strength, I insisted on my autonomy, wanting to take her into my arms, but being afraid to. A feeling of sympathy, empathic compassion pulled me closer and closer to her. Why couldn’t I resist this irrational gravity of emotional identification and burden myself with this replacement of suffering. I was making her pain my own, although I could not connect to it. I concluded it was possible I loved her.

The tears that welled up never showed. The sadness remained below the surface. I would not have mind if she had burst out, fell into my arm, entrusted her self to my care, but she did not. She looked at me, not revealing her thoughts. We looked at eachother, guessing, never bridging the unoutspoken desire to hold eachother.

Mechanically, I gently kissed her mouth. I placed my lips against her hair that smelled like aloe vera shampoo. She forcefully smiled tenderly and unconvinced.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know.’ She repeated the phrase with a resigned sigh and turned away her face.
‘You are fine now,’ I countered.
‘Look at the deep sky, the longer you look, the more bright dots there appear.’
‘I know what you mean,’ she leaned toward me, grabbed my face, and kissed me. Her hand lay in my neck. I wondered why people close their eyes when they kiss.