And so, she falls.

I am in LOVE. This is no mere crush.

The feeling that the very molecules of your DNA have rearranged themselves, and that the world has possibilities where there were only plain corners. That by standing on the back of this wave of pure inspiration, I too can achieve great things and greet the world with an untrained eye, a new eye, an unfettered, welcoming, curious, open eye.

Yes. I am in love. With Jeanette Winterson and her writing.

She was only just introduced to me by a friend who happened to be reading Jeanette’s latest memoir. My friend said she had a quote about poetry to send me, I said great, not really thinking much of it. And then I read my email.

The quote was like walking into the room and locking eyes with the person you will later have a torrid, fiery affair with. I was lit by it. And so I followed it, her trail, to her website. And began to read the excerpt from the book, the first chapter. I was mesmerized.

Like listening to someone on a first date describe what they do and are interested in, but you actually care. You’re actually hanging onto every word as if it were laden with the truth of the Universe and a single dropped syllable will leave you dangling off the cliff of sanity.

I read the chapter like my life depended on it – like the meaning of my life depended on it. And I followed her to Amazon. And to the public library.

And yesterday, I captured her. I caught up with her in the school library, in the stacks, far in the back, while students ticked away on papers and palms jutted into their weary faces.

There she was, nestled among others I had no eyes for at all. Glittering gold and the miasma of the universe could have split open around me, and I’d see nothing but Jeanette. I grabbed her. I went to the other section where she was, and I stock piled her. I pulled her out and on top of me. I melted under her weight and was levitated by it.

I radiated purpose and joy. The sense of purpose only pure love can bring. The moment of Ah Hah, the moment of clarity. The moment of infinite future, and complete finite utterly lostness of the present. Just here. In the musky scent of pages and binding. I gathered her up.

I absconded with her, like a Sabine woman, this taut, witty, tawdry, brutal, reluctantly tender woman. I ran with her out into the fading light of dusk, and I opened her up to me.

I ployed with her skin, brain cells fainted in her wake overcome by the fullness of witnessing her. And by witnessing her, I witnessed myself. I witnessed the magnitude of the human experience. I watched her dissect the grand Truths of the World into aching wisps of language that got tangled in my hair and singed my eyelashes.

I ingested her the way only lovers can do, wholly, boundlessly, allowed her to come inside and rearrange my organs to her pleasure. To kick my heart out of my lung and into my throat, to choke on her brilliance. I lay submissive to her steer-branding of every blood cell, let myself be mottled by her, cleaved apart by her, and culled back together with the mortar of her.

Yes, I am in love. And I am different for it.