You walk up the steps behind her and say, “I’ve been having these conversations in my head. They sometimes go like this: You should talk to her. You should read the rest of that book she mentioned the first time we spoke and say you read it. You would bring it up and say something like: I thought it was warm. Like when the father tells the daughter that if you take a book with you while traveling that the book begins collecting your memories of the time and place within its very story arc. You will say this. Then you will say that you are interested in why it is that people write, what it is that they are trying to do, what it is that they think they are doing. What is your trajectory? You will then say that we ought to get together and talk. And you will add: I am attracted to you.”
You let yourself breathe and then look right at her. You’d been talking as people do when they are articulating: off in the distance. Your awareness comes to this – that to focus on what you mean is to be what you mean. You feel your body in its excitement and trepidation. Anticipatory anxiety.
