Intimate Strangers

“She’ll change so suddenly; she’s just like mercury – She’s entwined in me, crazy as can be; yeah, but she’s all right with me“ – Mercury – Counting Crows

We met cute. I’d locked myself out of my apartment and if I’d a’ had a cell phone, which I do not, I wouldn’t have had the phone number to call for rescue anyway. So, by virtue of cosmic gamble, I walked east instead of west and knocked on the front door of the apartment two doors down from mine in my heavenly duplex complex. She answered the door cautiously, somewhat hiding at first behind some invisible worn-out wall of flimsy cardboard she’d erected to keep away those I suspect she thought might carry bad vibes. I scaled it in seconds.

She had a kind of dark hazy light around her that summoned something akin to the heroic in me and just as suddenly I felt a mild wave of protectionism surge in my psyche. In an instant it seemed we’d become what I can only describe as intense yet intimate strangers. So, words were exchanged, her phone offered, and the deed done; I split the scene to await my rendezvous with the cavalry. Later that day, out of a sense of panache girded by common courtesy I left a thank you note with my phone number in her mail box offering my services should they ever be needed. The rest as they say is current history.

Now she tells me she loves me every day, delivers hand-made artsy cards and love letters with great frequency and rubs my feet with sweet-smelling potions for hours at a time and I’ve never even asked for it once. Christ; she even cooks; and real good too. I normally can’t spend too much time with women unless it’s centered around sexual magnetic energy and the subsequent mattress gymnastics since they simply do not interest me. But on our first date we shared a gab-fest that lasted seven hours.

She tells me “you make me feel safe” and after the four words every man wants to hear most from his women, “I believe in you”, it’s the best five words any guy can ever hear from his soul mate. She has that perfect mixture of needing me while not being needy. She has her own life and that too ranks high on my woman/partner/lover wish list. She’s smart, sexy, sweet, loving and tilts toward her Mexican ancestral peasant warmth and strength. Her favorite way to make me laugh is her imitation of a Cholo switch blade artist saying, (if any other woman so much as looks at me;) “I’ll cut a bitch.”

She knows how to act like a woman and how to treat a man; a dying art form. She’s also promoting my career while having her own; a modern-day Lee Krasner to my Jackson Pollock. They say opposites attract and given our designer simpatico I guess so. However, and this may well be the best part of it all, my new girlfriend and I could not disagree more. I’ve had girlfriends wherein we were so alike, so precious, I ended up wanting to punch us in the face. If we’re out walking and there’s a split in the path, simultaneously, like a well planned comedy sketch; she says let’s go left while I point right. When she’s cold; I’m hot. If she’s hot; I’m sweating.

She’s got this 80’s goth cum Mestizo Indian style thing going and while she wears it well my contemporary American western style makes us look like we ought to be on opposing sides of the Spanish-American war or members of an savant-guard post punk rockabilly/jazz fusion band. She’s a technology geek perpetually wired in, while I still rely on a land-line for my phone; probably the last guy around without a cell phone or a GPS in my car. She’s into Werner Herzog and Wes Anderson while I favor Scorsese and Coppola. Maybe it’s our generational distance, which god knows she informs me of frequently, that accounts for our many dichotomies. Since she is the better part of two decades younger than me; that may account for some of our differences; but it works just about right for me overall since women my age are way too old for me.

I could go on; fill another page or two with similar contrasts that keep us loaded with debate material for conceivably the next millennium; but at this point you probably get the point. Yet despite this seemingly incompatibility we couldn’t be more attracted to each other. All our seeming differences pale in insignificance when superseded by the undeniable fact that she has the kind of face I want to fall asleep and wake up to? I can’t recall being more comfortable while at the same time more stimulated by any past love partner.

And so it goes. Just when I thought I’d jettisoned all attachments in an attempt to achieve my own personal brand of enlightenment, sequestered deep in my post recluse period, (now safely inside my new country gentleman period), I suddenly find myself jonesing for one more night wrapped around my loves warm and tender thighs like tinfoil; yearning for one more slow-motion kiss from her soft and yielding watermelon sugar lips.