The Life of a Hopeless Romantic

The Life of a Hopeless Romantic

He was eight years old at the time. There was a warm, inviting breeze blowing through the park that day as he stood adjacent to the bike path with his eyes closed and his arms outstretched in the wind, just feeling. Just using his four other senses to be at one with his surroundings. He could smell the food cooking on a nearby family’s barbecue grill; feel a leaf sweep by his fingers in the air; hear the young children, a boy and a girl, giggling as they played with their Labrador Receiver puppy; taste the orange juice on his tongue as he swallowed the last of it. Everything felt right. Nothing could go wrong, and nor could it get any better than this.

And that’s when he saw her. After a minute he’d opened his eyes again, and that was the moment. There she was. The love of his life. In that instant, he saw her – he really saw her, and everything she was, and he knew that she was beautiful. Sad, and perfect, and lonely, and beautiful. He’d opened his eyes to the sight of her watching him stand there, and after the moment had passed and she’d realized that he’d seen her staring, she quickly looked away and hurried off, presumably to find the rest of her family.

Wait!, he wanted to call out, but found that his voice wasn’t working. Suddenly, he realized that his arms were still stretched out perpendicularly and hastily brought them back down. Well, what should I do now? he thought, perplexed. He considered whether he should follow her, and, since he’d never met her before and it was thus insane to consider that option, he then considered what else he could possibly do instead. He ran through his choices. Go home. Go and get some food. Find his friend Danny and go play somewhere. He ran through these and other choices, and discovered that none of that mattered anymore; no other choice seemed to be the “right” choice, and none of it carried the least importance. He’d found her. It was the only way. He’d found her, and in doing so he had found his life’s purpose. She was his life, and his purpose, and his everything. And he’d never even spoken to her yet. Well, there was really only one thing to do now, and that was to go and fix that minor oversight.