My Strange Bedfellow,

We're warned that watched pots never boil, and yet people still sit around watching grass grow. If this continues, we'll soon be living in a brown, dry world. All the same--I understand. Presumably, the hungry man wants nothing more than to see that first pocket of steam break the otherwise serene surface, while Walt Whitman has nothing better to do than watch things that will necessarily elude his perception. It's apples and oranges.

Funny, lover, when infatuation creeps up at the most unlikely of times, and from the most unlikely people. And by the latter, I don't mean the people that you never think about, but rather the people that you have often pondered as the opposite of infatuable. (That's my word. I just made it up. Do you like it? I hope Merriam and Webster do.)

I've been slowly making my way through a Steven Pinker book over the last couple of months. He suggests that human intelligence has cropped up because of our ability to think in metaphors. According to him (or whomever he was citing), the first emergence of metaphorical/abstract thinking was probably for problem-solving (e.g., I can use sticks for retrieving tasty bugs which are out of my reach in very small ground holes; fruit is also out of my reach; I'll bet I could retrieve it by hitting it with a stick). But then it exploded, and we started conceptualizing the entire world in terms of metaphor. At this point, nearly all of our thought is metaphorical, even when we don't realize it: "speeding through the day" and "time crawling by" refer to LIFE IS A JOURNEY; "impenetrable logic" and "barrage of questions" refer to ARGUMENT IS WAR.

(By the way--did you notice the metaphor in the second paragraph? INFATUATION IS A PREDATOR.)

But one metaphor that I've been trying to figure out is "LOVE [or infatuation] IS FALLING." E.g., "I fell for you so hard [or fast]." If we're to humor the idea that LIFE IS A JOURNEY, why is the image for infatuation falling? Is it like falling? It isn't, right? It's more like deviating. Life is a journey, and hopefully you can see at least a few paces in front of you. Infatuation is like leaving that beaten path and striking out into thicket so dense that you can barely see your hand in front of your face. Is that, perhaps, when falling becomes imminent?

But in that case, isn't it the heartbreak that is falling?

Everything in metaphor, lover. Everything in metaphors and etymologies.

I like you like a fish likes water; I need you like a wave needs sand; I miss you like Keanu misses Patrick.

--Icarus