Love on the F train

So I think I fell just a little bit in love on the subway today. On the way back from work today, I got on the train at 57th street immediately plunked down in the first seat I could find (I was wearing heels for the first since last winter, and they hurt like a bitch and cut my ankles), which happened to be next to this guy writing furiously in a notebook. He was ridiculously cute, just my type: Indian, with some serious stubble and glasses wearing a plaid button-down and gray jeans. He was solid without being stocky, which is always pleasant to see in a city where most of the men look like anorexic 14 year old girls. I decided to let myself be a creeper and try to read what he was writing. It was completely illegible except for a sentence in capitals saying FIND A WAY TO REPHRASE WITHOUT SO MUCH REPETITION and my first thought was OHMYGOD he's a WRITER which naturally made him about a million times sexier. But anyways I took out the book of new and selected poems by David Kirby that I just got out of the library (and that I absolutely adore) and started reading and all of a sudden he looked over and asked "What are you reading?" And of course, I got ridiculously flustered and just showed him the cover and said "uhhhh David Kirby." And he was like "Ok," and I just prayed to whatever higher power may or may not exist that he would keep talking to me. But to my disappointment he just turned back to his notebook and went on writing. But it was Love. Love, I tell you!

Anyways, every once in a while when I'm reading poetry I find a line or stanza that I just love so much and just seems so prophetic I have to share it. Today it was this stanza from the poem The House on Boulevard Street by David Kirby:

I was also reading the great Marina Tsvetaeva
who wrote there was no approach to art,
that it was instead a kind of seizing,
and I thought, why shouldn't life imitate books?
Why shouldn't I reach out
and take what had already taken me?

And when I read that I thought, you know he's so, so right. Why, for once in my life can things not work out like they do in novels? I mean I realize that novels are escapist and idealized and well, fictional, but they must have some basis in fact to have been thought of at all, no?

So I kind of figured that I should throw my pride and caution to the wind for a little bit and see what happens. I need to stop being so afraid of being hurt. Because I've been hurt many, many times before but I'm still here and kickin and somehow still pretty optimistic a lot of the time. So I'm taking a chance. Let's hope it works.