architecture of falling

I’ve been told that falling in love is a solitary act, a private reckoning. You stand at the edge alone, carrying the jazz of it all, inside your chest, sometimes, too embarrassed, sometimes, like a secret too precious for daylight. Even when desire bends two bodies toward the same horizon, they say, the ‘falling’ hardly syncs. One heart always tends to move first. One pair of hands always reaches before the other decides to catch.

And desire, desire is lonelier still, signal and distortion, longing without landing. A seed that insists on sprouting regardless of weather, regardless of witness. It grows toward a sun you can’t see, sometimes toward one that doesn’t exist. You tend to it in silence. You shape your days around the ache. You rehearse saying “it’s fine” like a prayer and keep your body upright.

I have hoped. I have pretended

not to. I have excused.

I too believed love was a room

with one chair at the altar.

But then she arrived, equipped

with a freefall built for two.

Have you ever had your beliefs flounder in the face of beauty? Just like that night in Montenegro, under the stars at the base of the Durmitor peaks, I remember feeling the dizzying awe of a sky too generous to be true. The stars hung low enough to unfasten belief. The earth felt regal, newly crowned. For once, I wanted to roll back everything I’d been taught about our planet’s smallness and believe it just might be the centre of the universe. How could something so radiant be negligible? How could something so alive be accidental? No mere rock, no faraway insignificant satellite could be bothered with arranging such intricacy: fungus, minds, and love. Yes, love.

At its luckiest, I have now found, love (both romantic and platonic) is a transformation of architecture(s), both internal and external. I delight in the way the sounds and shapes and colours of the world that I've always understood in a single way suddenly begin to bend towards a new understanding, informed by or propelled by loving another person. When, for example, we say "this song now reminds me of you”, what is actually being said is "you have moved into the world of this song, I have you in welcomed it, and it is a different song now." And internally, I think being loved well provides an opportunity for a sort of internal renovation. The city of yourself, built/arranged/maintained by you and for you still gets to be yours, but the very act of someone being curious makes it porous. Someone wanders its roads, lingers at its monuments, points out possibilities you never saw.

She is an artist, which is to say she treats memory like a physical substance: pliable, unstable, holy in its decay. Her work doesn’t depict the world so much as dismantle it, piece by piece, until what’s left is the feeling beneath the thing. She paints not from observation, but from absorption. The way light felt at a certain hour. The shape of a silence between strangers. The nausea of routine, the violence of joy. Her paintings are less about scenes than about fractures, something lived cracking open, then blooming.

In one of the recent ones, a barista stands at his machine, back turned, framed in the rigid geometry of cups and steam wands, unbothered. But behind him, the café has unravelled into something else entirely: bodies tangled in movement, not dancing so much as ascending, or dissolving. Into each other. A rave intensifies where morning rituals once dampened the light. The business suit and the party dress now belong to the same fevered choreography.

This isn’t metaphor, it’s collision.

It’s what happens when the rituals of caffeine and congregation are exposed for what they really are: coping mechanisms, acts of worship, pleas. The barista doesn’t look up. He doesn't need to. The sacred is happening whether he notices or not. This is her gift - she takes the ordinary, tears it gently at the seams, and holds it up, dripping and luminous, asking only that we look long enough to recognise ourselves. She notices the world like it’s a living thing, her tasked with translating it. She struggles with words but never with colour. She paints the way some people pray: to confess, to survive, to make sense of what otherwise would crush her.

And I? I love to listen. So, we made a kind of home in the air between our words. She paints while I read. Time becomes dishonest. Hours loosen. If we stayed on that bench in the park, I’m sure the world would go on believing it had misplaced us.

We’ve had limited time together in person, but I’ve watched time compress and stretch for us, like a sentence that, in its finitude, becomes a place for invention. The days we’ve shared are heavy with detail: a painting too big for the car, gelato dissolving quicker than the air could hold it, a dainty watch unearthed in a market stall as if it had been rehearsing for her wrist. But they don’t remain in me as objects. They remain as evidence. Proof that time bends when two people agree to fall together. Proof that small acts of acceptance and curiosity can be architecture.

That night in London we walked our history backward, tracing the tremors of our first meeting: art exhibition, steak and frites, the ice cream we refused after the meal, the endless walking - doing nothing, gloriously forfeiting the thousand possible everythings, because here, in this city, possibility itself was the landscape and us choosing our version of the night made us feel opulent. Around us, towers of glass and steel blinked with their own indifference. Above, the sky rehearsed its shift: the sun giving way to the moon, but not without incident, saffron and pink poured across the horizon as if even departure required ceremony. The sky went white to grey to orange, as if a cigarette dragged back to life.

“Are you seeing this?” she asked.
“I think it’s because of us,” I said, fixed, as if moving might punch a hole in it.

And then it clicked. She was that kind of reordering. Neither of us flinched. Neither of us pulled away first.

There’s also this: language. We both carry our mother tongues shaped in other lands, a language that has always lived in the backseat of our daily lives. I’ve spoken it mostly over the phone, at odd hours, across time zones, with people I’ve had to love from a distance. Language, stretching across the ocean without snapping. But never, until now, has love spoken back in that same language. To find her in this land, where everything is translation and negotiation, felt like being called by my name for the first time in years. The whole name. The one I thought I’d left behind somewhere between convenience and forgetting. All three syllabes arriving with the same intensity, before I cut two of them loose. Suddenly, it wasn’t a language of reach, but of arrival, not to be explained or rationed with. That simple. That miraculous.

So, if anyone tells me again that to falling in love can be isolating, I’ll say: no, beloved, not always.

I’ve seen time bend around two people.

I've breathlessly fallen through the door, gripping onto folds of flesh.

I’ve eaten tiramisu at 4 a.m. from her fingers.

I’ve laid side by side in a green sari’s afterglow, air thick with sleep and sweat cooling between us.

I’ve made a forest floor of our bodies.

I’ve been at the centre of the universe.

I’ve watched beliefs collapse under the weight of a laugh.

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I’ve fallen. And I wasn’t alone.

So let me say this: Love, I think, is a room

that expands as you enter it.

I know it now. So, I’ve stepped in.

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A/N: Back after a long time, happy to be here. ‎ ‎ ‎