That Time I Met An Emotionally Available Woman

Once, I walked into a public radio station in Pasadena and my entire world shifted as if stepping onto small, tectonic plates. The floor parted, and I was thrust towards a sparkly-eyed woman posing as a receptionist. She was wearing a sweater, and her hair rested on it like golden leaves on a field of summer grass.

I was so taken by her, I almost gave her the green juice I was hired to deliver to someone else. After she paged the correct recipient, I said goodbye in what I thought was a casual kind of way.

A week later, I drove back to the front desk and asked for her phone number. She wrote it down on a yellow, sticky note and said, "Stephen Phillips! Yes!" as if she had won a prize.

It was the space between the exclamation points that made me fall for her. The unsubtle path by which they wove their way through her entire body and imprinted themselves upon her cheekbones.

The following week, when I picked her up in one of the many neighborhoods of Los Angeles, she greeted me with a smile that would make a golden retriever question its occupation. She laughed when I complimented her. She twirled around her apartment looking for her keys. The awakened world, so it seemed, was reason enough for her to exist. With her as my admission ticket, I held on tightly to see what lay ahead.

Sitting next to her in the theater off Sunset, watching the evening performance and looking away to find her piercing eyes beneath a veil of stage light, I realized I had come face-to-face with a woman open to the layered mystery that love brings. She who is familiar with swinging her heart's door and stopping it so it stays that way. One who, in the incoming night, throws open the windows of her soul with such abandon that you wake and see her through the edges of the trees.

You wake to see her heart arriving. You turn to find out where the light has landed.

I held on to those pieces of light long after that night was over. I held them all the way back to her white-washed drive and potted plants like stepping stones. When I kissed her, I cradled her head should any more secrets spill out. Who was this woman with no bridge to cross? Who opened a door I needed only to walk through?

She told me in broadcast messages over the ensuing weeks. She spoke in Morse code rhythms over sidewalks and small cafés. When she did, her hands and elbows waved me forward like a traffic controller. Her voice, a poem I longed to mark in the pages of my life.

I realized, as she inched her face closer, sometimes in public areas, sometimes by bodies of water, sometimes  - I would come to adore - sitting on a bar stool like a queen avoiding her responsibilities, that I had never encountered something like this before in all my travels. I had never met someone who only blocked my path if she wanted to be kissed.

She kissed me like the plane was falling, and the ship was sinking, and the world was ending. There was urgency behind it, and presence. All this and all I tried to do was pay the bill.

I kept walking along the river basin. To galleries where she blossomed and movie theaters where I saw her inner child start to grow. All the while, she was a play without intermission. The door remained open and the curtain never closed.

Weeks later, when she returned my call, her plane landed in New York, her mind preparing for rehearsals for a role she had booked while wrapped in woolen layers against the spring freeze, she said, "I miss you. Do you mind if I tell you that? Beside, I'm only this way because of you. I can't help it if you're the one who brings it out of me."

And there, in an instant, I had part of the answer. I was open, too and could rest easy for a spell. She overwhelmed me with such force I never examined my own role within the drama. I was playing a part in her fire, her midnight dance she stoked within me as we viewed sunsets from opposing coasts.

When she returned to L.A. and we continued seeing each other, keeping the lights on above the porches of our hearts for as long as the journey required, I knew I had stumbled across more than just a fleeting spark. Just as I experienced the quake that thrust me toward her, I now carried that same disturbance, a disruptive longing each time I laid eyes on her.

I wanted to tell her that I could not shake her. I had seen enough of the world and she had won me without changing herself.

They were simple thoughts as I prepared to see her that humid evening in Glendale, only four months since our first encounter. I thought of her as within reach. She called me from the solitude of her apartment and asked to postpone our meeting while I watched lightning in the distance. The show was near an ending, but did I think we could be friends instead? I swallowed and said, "Absolutely." as I stared at a list of questions I had written. I had typed them out for her. Things like, What's new in Central Park? or What did you hear a pedestrian shout to another?

I went to bed hungry over what might have been and woke up worried, unkept and frightened. I felt I had dreamed it, just as I had first dreamed her. The days turned into weeks and I assumed she arrived to the coast unharmed and happy, with good sentiments, but without any urge to reach me to hear my second thoughts.

I wondered what her's were. I thought of her in her kitchen again, between the window and the patch of sun, without my arms encircling the small of her waist.

I knew, and still know how swiftly things change in the land of women. I do not blame them. I only attempt to travel well. 

Months later, when it became clear I would not hear from her, I drove by her apartment on my way home from work and as if I would see her walking down the darkened sidewalk. I sat in my car, and presented invisible arms to her. A few moments of silence, and I started and drove away.

At some point, before the end of the year, I learned she was back East, back to New York to be with her ex and the thought occurred to me that our months were tainted. Perhaps she was ordinary. Maybe she never intended to let me in. 

No, I would later think. Not like that. I did not wish to remember her that way. In acts of love, the gift of presence receives and shuts us out with the same, terrifying desire, and because of my encounter, I now know we are as open as those that come inside. I see the mirror she saw in me, a pureness that was extinguished, but burned long enough to exist. Within it, a safety where secrets were honored, where everything was revealed or swept away, but nothing fell between.

Somehow, she trusted me from the beginning of those timeless tremors. I wonder, if I see her again, if she will recognize in me a man who was her own work and no one else's.

It is my duty to remain grateful. I remember what she taught me and each morning, look toward the light.