Saying It

I know I said I'd cool it, but I only lasted an extra 24 hours without him.

On saturday TMI and I took a train about 20 minutes out of Dijon to visit the little and lovely wine village of Beaune. We explored, shared a salad with toasted chevre and a small chocolate cake, I marveled at the new experience of standing in a hollowed out tree, and moments later, discovered what it was like to receive a line of warm neck kisses in one. It was like making out in a living, creaking, coat.

Back in Dijon and curled in the sheets together, I initiated the unexpected. I had been sure it wouldn't be me, sure I wasn't feeling it or ever going to feel it, yet, for the last week, there it was: rolling around in my mouth like a piece of gum I'd been chewing way too long and needed to spit out. After a bit of provocation, I told TMI I loved him. I told him exactly that sentiment; that it had been waiting in my mouth, and he confided experiencing the same thing. Where I didn't expect to feel anything I felt like I'd bumped an electric fence. He asked me to say it to him with his name. I did. He said it back.

Then, for roughly the next 30 hours, we had unbelievable sex in every sense of the word; literal, suggestive, and up for interpretation.

When I walked back to my place this evening, thinking about possibly being in love, I passed a shoe store and glanced Harry's shoes in a display window. Something instantly tugged in my chest, and I wondered. TMI and I have both conceded that we don't have the butterflies. We don't have the exhileration we believe "love" is supposed to have. And yet we wanted to say it to eachother, maybe without knowing what it meant.

So I asked myself.. what are we feeling that puts those words in our mouths? What puts any words involuntarily onto our tongues, waiting to jump out? The only other thing I could think of that does that is music. Why are those three words such infamous escape artists? After a block and half of fervently trying to put my finger on the sensation I jotted it up as the day's mystery.