Warm For No Good Reason

I had been walking in the woods, warm for no good reason on a mid-November day, even the sinking sun was trying hard to look summery but didn't. It was cold and I should have felt it. But I did not.

Pale yellow circle of late light, that sun, cut up in shards by the sharp noisy bundle of bare tree branches, windblown and rattling like sailboat masts sans sails, the sun was heading out. Friends had lit a small bonfire and we were roasting food around it, crouching down, huddling together, trying to stay warm.

I was warm. I was warming to you, thinking of you, wondering about you. Afterwards in the car heading home, it was past dusk now, just dark, they all had their headlights on. And I was looking at the evenness of the traffic, the tameness of their progress homeward and I realized most of these people actually wanted these simple, level-headed, mostly ordinary lives.

There was a love song on the radio, velvety and red and passionate against this black and white scene of cars, evening, traffic, people in grey overcoats. And again I thought, listening to the singer sing of love, they don't want too much passion in their lives, it makes it harder to live, harder to just go home and hide in your house. Passion comes running after you, stalking you down a street, forces entry into your locked vestibule, lobbying for your favor, half in and half out of your door, there could be kisses and all that pressing against one another can make a mess of a house some days, some nights.

They don't want that -- most people. They don't want what I feel in my heart most days, boiling like a crazy cauldron, that passion, that desire I feel for you that no overcoat can stop, that longing to find your skin under all those layers, to share mine, to mutually unbundle. They want the sameness of this even slow deliberate traffic. Too much passion in a winter wood, around a throbbing bonfire is just too much some days for some people.