True Romance
Notes on love and attention.
I once heard love described as that specific craving where you suddenly need to know someone’s opinion on everything. It’s an addiction, almost: the sensation of having another question breathlessly lined up before they’ve had time to finish answering the first. Topics you yourself have already litigated to death, but now there’s this new angle (even if it’s not new) from the only source that matters.
This may sound obvious.
“Yes,” you might think. “That’s why we say ‘I want to get to know you.’”
But the context of this description was one of those first dates. The kind where you keep extending because there’s simply too much ground to cover. You’re no longer gathering biographical facts so much as trying to understand how this singular being experiences the same world you’ve been trudging through alone. You’ve heard a million takes on everything. But in this moment, there is only one.
So you go on a bender of them.
One drink becomes dinner. Dinner becomes a nightcap. A…