Falling

Falling into it, we all did it then, one way or another. Falling in love, I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven was always just around the corner. the more difficult it was to love the man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation when love came to life.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember when its gone, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done.