Fragment on falling in love

Her eyes were dark, not black but brown, a high-pitched D minor, the colour of antique patina. They washed over the manifold of his experience as a truth dawns over an uncertain consciousness. He felt as if he was falling and simultaneously rising, the same momentary sense of disorientation a passenger feels when a railway station unhooks its tethers and pulls away from a stationary train.

The first time he was untethered by the concordance of her eyes it seemed there could be no possible alternative in any possible world. It was now an immutable Law of Nature, as unquestioning as the wind, that in the same room they would broaden and lift their eyes, touch fingertips, conduct invisible electricity to which other people mustn’t have access; electricity latent among all people, housed deep inside them, inaccessible to choice, coursing and twisting in endless random spasms, the will driving us all now forwards, now backwards. And like the wind the currents which drew them together were not capricious but purposeful, disposed of a certainty of movement, not blown here and there like leaves, but forever being sucked as is the air, sucked from a place of high pressure to a place of lower pressure, rushing across the globe unconcerned and without effort. No-one else could be like that, all those others whose lives bob up and down like corks adrift on a great invisible ocean of hidden desires. In amongst the spinning quantum particles whose tiny yet endless labyrinths we have no hope of navigating as they sublimate our unconscious desires or draw into consciousness the illusion of our choices, in amongst synapses clicking into being doubt and surprise and disgust and charade, a pair of eyes looked at him with the sound of bells, wide and deep, and undercut choice, undercut doubt, straightened into certainties everything that was hitherto pulsing and unpredictable.

It was at this time, sucked as air across atmospheres, in violent covenant with love, that he would suddenly become aware of the inside of his ribcage, as if his internal organs had dissolved and melted to the base of his abdomen leaving his heart in remainder, suspended and helpless. This, he told himself, is happiness. A new bright-lit objectivity. This must be how god himself might part the clouds with his wrinkled white fingers to look upon the tumult of his creation, himself safely suspended high in the firmament. Other times the dizzy gutted sensation made him feel sick: sick and weak. Then his chest wall was not dissolving himself into a unity, but had become insubstantially thin, nothing but a cowardly evaporating membrane between his heart and another synecdoche too tightknit to undo: these unyielding eyes, shining brown lights which did not invade his body piercingly, but through their benign overwhelming power caused his sternum to crumble, his viscera to atrophy and his gut to surrender to a force against which it had neither means nor desire to resist.