True Love

Of course, true love looks a lot different after fifteen or thirty or fifty-five years.  By then, it's acquired a patina of wear from failed businesses, shared parenting, and forgiven misunderstandings.  All that water under the bridge leaves a mark.

But there's something about the moment of recognition with another soul that captivates us.  There's something about the brief window of time when love exists not as a scrapbook but as a mystery box.  Then, as we never do again, we see possibility and hope and wonder in each other.  Falling in love is a kind of magic that most of us don't experience too often.

And whether or not we experience it for ourselves, we wish it for other people.  Love, especially fragile new love, invites us to champion it.  We see two people drawing together, and we root for them.  We want their story to succeed.  We want them to open their own mystery box together.

The couple in this Disney short (Paperman - you can see the full version on the Wreck-It Ralph DVD) provoke this kind of empathy in me.  I want them to find each other.  I want them to be happy.  And beyond the feeling of experiencing true love yourself, this empathy is a kind of magic, too.  People who feel it don't get anything from another person's love story except the quiet, generous satisfaction that there is a little more happiness in the world - another chance that something can go marvelously, serendipitously right.

My first book, Dawn Hyperdrive and the Galactic Handbag of Death, is available from Amazon and Smashwords as an e-book, and it's coming to my website next week as a paperback book!