The Love Show

All day I've been laying in bed listening to all the shows on This American Life that are about love. I've been doing it a lot lately. Every time I go to the website, I scan through the archives looking for the ones about relationships, specifically and hungrily. I have no interest in anything else. I've even listened to the same shows twice, even three times that I had heard over the past year, picking out small parts that I remember, anticipating the ending again and again. Especially the ones that suddenly make me tighten up and tears burst out of my eyes uncontrollably. There is a knot in my chest, not a pain, just a sudden connection between the mind and the heart, that pulls till the fibers slowly uncoil. Each time I react differently, each time I feel a slight change.

Usually it's the memory; the sentiment, that does me in.
Trends: parents and children, death, lost love, and moments of true love: JOY.
Trends: monologues, short sentences whispering a pained name, reasoning without reason or emotion.

"Hey! I wanted to introduce you to my wife and my son!"
I looked over, forcing a giant smile on my face, turning down the volume of the show about a mother and her son.
It looked like a small cloud rained all over my face.
For a second she had a worried look until I mentioned that I had been listening to This American Life and gave a textured laugh. Hearty soup.

I was laying on my bed tonight listening to a 70 year old man read poems about his dead wife. The part that made me tense up suddenly was the gentle memory of her pulling up to the house with groceries in the trunk of their Saab. I imagined it was fall and the car was red.
Just like that. Simple. True. Gone.

This morning the story was about a beautiful man who loved an ugly woman, and, as you could guess, the roles switched:

..."Go on and leave, you ugly bitch," he says to her, and as he says the words, as one by one they leave his mouth, she's transformed into the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. He says the words again, almost tenderly. "Leave, you ugly bitch." Her hair is golden, her brown eyes deep and sad, her mouth full and affectionate, her tears the tears of love and loss, and her pleading, outstretched arms, her entire body, the arms and body of a devoted woman's cruelly rejected love. A third time he says the words. "Leave me, you disgusting, ugly bitch." She is wrapped in an envelope of golden light, a warm, dense haze that she seems to have stepped into, as into a carriage. And then she is gone, and he is alone again"...


Laying there, going in and out of the story, I imagined you. Finally.
I remembered what it was like to be in love. I've been trying for a while, searching desperately for years to find that innocent happiness, only stuck at lonely dead ends and painful defeats.
Not today.
Today, we were on a bus, we were walking down a cobblestone street, we were in a forest climbing branches, we were laughing at a dinner party, we were standing in the middle of a beautiful city and I looked up at you, into your face, the world a blur, and told you I loved you.

Yes! You! Future you! You whom I've never met or one I have, you who exists now as something tangible, fresh, sweet, true. You from the past or from the future, from this life or from the next, whenever it may be, it is you. The one that feels like a warm blanket, the one pulled right up to my nose. The one who loves me most ( the one I love truly).


Tonight imagined you walking through my door. You climb right into bed with me without taking off your shoes or your jacket. Your clothes are cold, your are fingers freezing, yet you wrap them around my warm stomach and I take my hot hands and press them over yours.
With my eyes closed, I turned my head toward the ceiling, out of the blanket, my lips slightly parted. I imagined the cool air on my lips were yours and the space between our mouths pink and soft, like a petal. You hold my damp face, stick your hand into my chest, holding my heart genlty like an antique tea-cup, and through my eyes, pour in warm, warm love.

Show excerpt from "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story"
by Russell Banks