i love you but i don't know you

i felt dis­con­nect­ed all day. dis­tant. dis­joint­ed. anoth­er bee in the hive. i don’t know why.

when i stepped out­side get­ting off work, it was grey, breezy, devoid of sun­shine.

the bass in my ears moved me. dri­ving the beat of my heart. walk­ing my feet.

the sun slow­ly came out, mixed bit­ter­sweet with the clouds.

and then you showed up. black and white across the street.

i kept my head down as you walked by, care­ful not to ruin that per­fect image in my head. it was enough to keep me going. to make me smile when the most i could feel all day was neu­tral.

i love you but i don’t know you.

7 comments

  1. Thanks Pearl. Nice to hear from a pub­lished author and lin­guist. :)

  2. Instances like that always spin me off into imag­i­na­tive and whim­si­cal thoughts for the rest of the day.

  3. You know, I did­n’t feel like writ­ing that day until that moment hap­pened. It felt so great that I was com­pelled to cap­ture it as best I could.

  4. I’ve often thought, what if when we die, we could sud­den­ly get a rush of all the moments in our lives we did­n’t know about that con­cerned us.… that sud­den­ly you could see your whole life from a dis­tance above your­self and hear all the thoughts your loved ones and even strangers spoke in their heads about you — things that would sur­prise you and you nev­er knew. Some of it would be flot­sam, some of it painful, and some of it won­der­ous and unex­pect­ed. What would you have done, how would your life have changed, if you had heard those thoughts dur­ing your life?

    I’ve thought so many thoughts like yours and won­dered if they need­ed to hear them, sad they nev­er would know they changed me. Wondered what changes I’d have made if I’d heard more than I did.

  5. An inter­est­ing idea.

    Personally, I think it would be bet­ter not know­ing. There’s only so much we can do. I think it would be like going to a psy­chic and find­ing out when you’re going to die. We’d change our lives to live to the fullest until that day, and it would seem very unnat­ur­al to me.

    Better not to know, I’d say.

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