Tomorrow, if all goes well, I have a date with Neil.
I am so happy with Neil that sometimes I am jealous of myself. I fully understand why our friends are kind of nauseated around us. I suppose if I were forced to sit in a room with a couple of imbeciles who drew little hearts on the bottoms on their feet in aqua-colored Sharpie, and then played footsie and grinned at each other, I'd be kind of sickened too.
I love this man's brain. I love his twisted imagination. I love the nearly-useless facts he always seems to know -- like that a toilet-flush only wastes 1.6 gallons of water, and not eight, like the hippies'll tell you. I love how he's not afraid to skip across streets at intersections, or sing silly songs in public. I love that Neil knows how to make REAL maple syrup. I love that we feel the same way about the insidious nature of Wal-mart. I love how we almost never have to really explain things to each other; we just sort of get them most of the time. I love how his eyes glow sometimes. I love how he always seems to be wisest in the areas of my ignorance, and I see to be wisest in the areas he can't seem to see. I love feeling his heart beat under my hands.
Also, I happen to think Neil is the most physically attractive person on the planet. He'll blush when he reads that, and probably sort of shake his head, but it's true. Helena's got the hottest boyfriend in the world. Maybe the universe.
I can't wait until our date tomorrow. The anticipation is sort of making me dizzy.
I walked down the hill from the school, to the mall. I stood at the entrance next to the Arby's and waited for the bus to pick me up. I took the number 35 downtown, to Java Joe's coffeehouse, to visit with my friends. Most of the time, it was just an excuse to see Neil. It wasn't like we were dating or anything; I was just in love with him and I loved talking with him and having coffee. Every minute that we spent together seemed warm and wonderful.
Unfortunately, I don't know jack shit about physics, really, except those things I've sort of been able to puzzle out on my own. Like, I understand the concept of gravity, for example. And I know the concepts of most of Newton's laws. And I know that when you drop a pebble into a glass of water, it makes ripples along a certain pattern, depending on certain factors, although I don't remember what those factors really are. But that's about it.
In an effort to try to patch some of the cracks in this area of my education, I'm going to insist that Neil teach me some of the things about the physical properties of nature that I don't get. HE seems to get them. One day, I asked him how one would calculate the rate of acceleration of an imaginary perpetual-motion machine we'd been discussing. Said machine consisted of a cat with a buttered slice of bread attached to its back. If a cat always lands feet downwards, and a slice of bread always lands butter-side down, it only makes sense that neither one could land, and the apparatus would hang, suspended just above the ground, whirling a little bit. Neil figured out that the machine would accelerate. And then explained why.
Sometimes I think that, around him, my heart will never stop accelerating.
It is almost tomorrow... It is almost tomorrow... And then I get to spend a whole day alone with Neil, just us... It's so hard to wait for tomorrow that I'm kind of drooling, I think.
~H.T.*