Otherwise titled: off the market. Or maybe: can this REALLY be my life!?

Oh, love. They say it’ll happen when it happens; they say when you know, you know. They say any number of things that “they,” being faceless and malleable, can’t back up, but damn it if they’re not all too often right.

It’s way too soon to fold my hand, to cash out and write I’m in love, y’all. I know this. Thing is, that feels like the only course. This whole “date around” theme that seems to have taken hold? That whole “don’t rush anything and take it slow”? Yeah. Not so much.

We collided, the PhD and I, in a very rare window. His e-mails and my answers; my crises and his listening ear. It couldn’t have happened any other way.

Friday late—8.30 on—was the only overlap our schedules yielded last week. “Let’s meet at that sushi place you like in Old Town,” he wrote. Not wanting to look like a total idiot, I pretended I actually had a favorite sushi place in Old Town. I don’t. I know all sorts of places downtown … the sushi, I fear, I have never kept local. He lives (conveniently) right up the street, so Old Town was clearly the best plan; google, then, to the rescue. (Yes, the same google implicated as an accomplice of The Crazy. The same Crazy who’s been conspicuously silent on this one, save some wildly unsuccessful searches indicating that he died in Virginia in 1848. Huh.).

The restaurant I ultimately chose was awesome, but totally, totally small. The reviewers said a lot about the quality; “this place is great!,” they all wrote. None of them bothered to mention “Except it only has four tables.” There was a bit of a wait when I got there, but once he arrived, we were next up and a table just magically opened. We split a bottle of sake and talked till they were all but bussing our table, there in the suddenly empty restaurant; we took those words down to the water, and walked up and down the Potomac. Entrenched and looking to steal a few more minutes, we sat down on the riverfront. Couples walked past, coming back from drinks and late dinners, and as the echoes of their footsteps faded, the birds got quiet. The moon moved across the sky.

We were laughing about something when it hit us: there in the east, the sun. Evening fell and morning came: we talked our way to Saturday.

In a shockingly sad lot of ways, that conversation—that connection—was exactly what I thought I was going to find last weekend in Pennsylvania. Like, to a T. I couldn’t have been more wrong about that, or more surprised about this; all this goes to show, I guess, that no matter how much you plan some things, you can’t court fate. You just can’t.

We walked back up those cobble-stones to his jeep in the early morning light, and it just was. A collision of he and I; a broad-brushed stroke on the canvas of us in bold colors. Indelible, and so much the beginning.

I wasn’t home for ten minutes before my alarm went of. I smiled at the backwardness of it, washed my face, and got into bed.

I spent a lot of time Saturday afternoon trying to decide whether it was all just a dream; whether, if I just closed my eyes and yielded back to sleep, I could find myself back down there.

It was the most surreal conversation. It’s foolish to try to assign it words, but it’s like this: I was me. I got to say whatever I wanted, and he liked me. Just as me. The man’s intensely brilliant—no joke, he can quote Latin and things—but I never once felt like I had to measure up. Looking back, another thing that impresses me is that we weren’t drinking. (!! I know). The vodka speaks a shiny soliloquy, sure, but it isn’t really me, not in the way intentionally uncensored words are. There was an intimacy there that was not at all artificial. (Is it sad to admit I’d forgotten what that’s like?)

Saturday brought another amazing set of e-mails; Sunday, a somewhat awkward India meeting. We talked outside my car afterwards like shy high schoolers stealing glances in the parking lot between classes.

He came over to my little apartment that night. We still weren’t out of words, though I don’t know how that’s possible; he held my hand, and I held his right back. (And then I held a lot more, but this is a PG-13 blog, mmm-hmm).

He asked for a photo of my sisters and me from the biochemist wedding because, he said, I “look so beautiful in it.” He left with one on my hair elastics around his wrist. I can wear my tallest tall-shoes, and he still beats me by a fraction of an inch (I made him stand in front of the mirror—yes). He smiles at my insanity, but his eyes and his kiss say he’s falling, hard.

He called me this afternoon to wish me luck at the dentist (ssss booo, nasty cavities); he can’t wait to see me, and can we please get together tonight? I listen to the voicemail again as I put another coat of caladryl on my mosquito-chomped legs. (The conversation was oh-so-worth it. But my god, I’m a mosquito magnet; my legs look like I’ve got severe chicken pox. I count 37 right now, and that’s not including my back or shoulders. Yikes). In five hundred thousand ways, it’s falling together so perfectly.

Except. (Because there’s always an except): he’s moving. To New York. On Thursday. (Yes, as in a pithy TWO DAYS from now). He’s a college professor, and he’s taken a totally kick-ass post up that way. It starts right after India (which, SHOCKER, is NEXT WEEK).

In a really insane way, I feel like it’s going to work notwithstanding. I just know it will, in a way that words can’t possibly spell out. There’s something going on here that’s so real, and so powerful; something that’s totally shaken up my expectations and prior understandings. It’s radical and new and it just feels so right. He’s already invited me up, and says he’ll send loads of t-shirts and sweatpants and things from his new school (after my own heart, yes! I’m such a sucker for that kind of stuff). He says he doesn’t know how he’ll make it, now that he’s seen a glimpse of this new us, but he promises it was worth it, and that we’ll fight for it.

But that doesn’t undercut that this could really suck, in a lot of ways. I’ll jump into it here, and I have no problem writing out I’M FALLING IN LOVE WITH THIS GUY. This is my head-space, and that’s what it’s like. But in practice, I’ve got to work hard to keep it real, and in check. I’m going to have to.

Welcome to my life. I just love to complicate the hell out of it.

But oh, our poor priest. I don’t think he counted on this little romance at all. This could get interesting, this keeping-of-the-distance in India. Then again, though, isn’t that what real romance is? The stuff of spontaneity, and intrigue; of kisses stolen in dark corners in foreign lands? This may be a consequence of growing up on Carey Grant and Clark Gable, but I’m prepared to say that the adventure starts now. And it’s going to be a wild one.