When you are falling in love with someone the whole wide world goes technicolor. Everything seems electrified, your feet literally do not the ground. Yes when one is falling in love nothing remains the same. The daily routine, the bad hair days, and even your split ends become a cornucopia of goodness. Falling in love makes the hours of the day tick by too fast.
Falling in love. Those tender moments. Those wonderful delicious moments where we want it all and often forget to savor the feeling. Where one can spend hours and hours, talking and talking about who we are and what we have done. Where we dive into the past hoping to catch up to the present and look starry eyed into the future.
When I met French Husband it was like that. Dreamy. He opened a door that had been closed, making my days seemed brighter. Though instead of spending hours and hours, talking and talking, we spent most of our time repeating words, laughing, and trying to know one another without being able to tell one another who we were. Actions do have a language all their own.
One of our first dates French Husband took me to Baker Beach in San Francisco for a picnic. I do not recall what we ate, though I do remember cheap champagne and cookies and that the beach was not like any beach I had seen before. The bathers were nude.
As we hiked down to the beach my attention was on the steep embankment. I had never been to Baker Beach and couldn't wait to see the Golden Gate from that angle. We were halfway down when I noticed that swimsuits were of a minimum. My mind raced in every direction:
- Oh no! I do not want this French Hunk of Burning Love to think I am a prude.
- Oh no! I work for the Catholic Church. What if I recognize someone, or worse if someone recognizes me?
- Jesus wasn't fully dressed on the cross, was he?
- Oh no, I am comparing Jesus to a nudist beach!
- Why the bodies down there are not all perfect and pointy.
- I wonder how one goes about undressing at a nude beach.
- Certain parts of me are surely go to get sunburned.
The sand had nothing to do with me dragging my feet, though they felt like they were stuck in mud. I didn't know where to put my eyes. I felt like the elephant in the room. My every movement seemed over defined. Yann did not blink an eye- even when I took off my clothes. My thoughts raced again:
- How many naked women has he seen?
- I mustn't be that sexy.
- This is crazy. I can hardly talk to this guy and here I am bearing it all.
- Talk about up close and personal.
- Wow.
- Now what do I do? How do I sit? Where do I put my hands.
- Do not lay on you stomach... Why that will seem too prudish, won't it?
Just as that last thought passed through my head I felt Yann's arm around me. I remember thinking, "Okay this is normal, guy and girl having a picnic on the beach, guy puts arm around girl and girl leans in." But instead of leaning in I cracked up. Laughing louder than the waves hitting the beach. It seemed that eyes from Japan through California to China turned and looked at me. I could almost hear them saying under their blase expressions, "Oh it must be her first time." After which I stopped laughing and kissed Yann. In which case he rolled on top of me. In which case the entire ocean could not contain the one enormous thought going on in my head.
And though I have bared it all in this post. This one thought I will keep to myself.
---------------
Photo of a painting in Musee d'Orsay, do you know the painter and title?
I wish I had taken one of Picnic on the Grass by Manet.
