You know you have fallen in love because every cell in your body announces that you just might die—directly.  Your mind briefly, and in a rare nanosecond of clarity, tells you you’ll survive if it ends, like you always have, that nothing catastrophic has happened…yet, that it’s just Monday and she has no clue the world is ending, although you can already feel the barometer dropping, the sky changing, the distant rumble of chaos. But reality and history mean nothing. Wisdom and experience? Por favor. The thing just is. And you’ve seen too much deviousness and devastation to be sane, let alone normal. Whatever that is. In love at 57. As if lessons carried no weight. Everything is different but nothing’s changed. 4^th Grade is another world but seconds away. High school, centuries past, but as close as my shadow. It’s a carnival and a dream, a scary, unimaginably cruel place, and a glorious, hopeful spring. A ride at the Youth Fair, one I barely survived in 1984 (not without consequence and lifelong effects or defects), is a perfect metaphor for the whole damn thing.

The Tilt-a-Whirl was a ride that challenged its passengers to retain what swam in their stomachs. The patriotic colors on the round, rapidly spinning cars, like shiny metallic versions of our confident flag, boasted of pride, robust energy, and the tendency to disguise danger and aggression with fun and good intentions. I’ve always been partial to amusement rides that drop, filling your insides and groin with a tickle that becomes hilariously unbearable, but those that twirl, like the old diabolical teacups at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, invariably bring about nausea and disorientation. Like any bona fide relationship.

At the sight of the multicolored light bulbs announcing the Tilt-a-Whirl, my group ran towards the ride and a queasy thrill, so I followed suit, completely ignoring knowledge of myself and the probability of a chunky, acidic mess.

“Let’s go!” cried my brother. “Ride with me.”

“I think I’ll watch this time. I just had a slice and a corndog”

“Come on, man. Do it. You’ll thank me later.”

I bet. But I paid my fare, buckled in, and prayed. SHE was riding, and I wouldn’t be left behind for lack of courage. The ride began slowly with a favorite metal song at a loud but comfortable volume and the revolutions tolerable in intensity and frequency. But it didn’t last, and within twenty seconds, Iron Maiden’s “Flight of Icarus” thundered with mythical anger while the whirling of the American-colored helmet-cars increased to near invisibility. I was see-sick, my eyes saturated with motion and the mad world making me ill in a continuous, tortuous pirouette. The sun was on the other side of the planet, but, like Icarus, the song’s tragic hero, ambition put me in a bad place, and I wanted to fly high to my destruction, substituting the lick of Helios and a fatal plunge, for weightless isolation and the moon’s hard surface and cold, absent air.

I tried to focus on her face every time our cars faced each other, but as the ride worked itself to a frenzy, I lost her and could only see pastel smudges interrupted by an occasional, suspended still life of a tree, ticket booth, or the House of Mirrors. I shut my eyes hard and my gullet harder, as if to deflect bugs attacking on the wind, and to avoid anything projecting upwardly and orally from my tumultuous innards. My brother kept turning the evil wheel jutting from the floor. That diabolical iron wheel, daring us. He turned it with sinister ferocity. The spin was now intolerable, maddening.

I was quiet and losing color, but my brother cheered for more, like a drunken buffoon at last call. I cursed him and his ability to weather the gyration, and I dug my nails into his arm. He was lathered in adrenaline and felt nothing. I grimaced to brace for disaster, gripped tighter onto metal and hairy skin, and considered yelling for an emergency stop.

“Isn’t this great!” he yelled as his cheeks, like fleshy gills, fluttered back in folds by centrifugal force.

“I…h–hate…this…”

“Haha! Woo-hoo!”

I swallowed dryly about a dozen times and took deep, slow breaths: in through my nose and out through my pursed mouth. At the pinnacle of the three-minute spin-cycle, with one final gut-blasting swivel of the car, I tossed it all. It came out in a single sloppy meatball that rolled over my bottom lip and landed on my Godspell sweatshirt. It landed on Jesus’s face, and its juice dribbled off his forehead, spreading outward through his pained eyes and thorny crown. I crucified us both. The humiliation and fear were crippling. I felt like bawling but couldn’t. One catastrophe was enough. I opened my eyes for an infinitesimal period, and there was her face, an image frozen for an instant with colored light trails, an action snapshot taken at low speed and etched onto the inside of my eyelids. Her placid smile, aimed unmistakably at me, glimmering behind a wind-pasted curl of her brown, lustrous hair, had made it through the din, the smoke and the yellow hued dizziness. Her look, a powerful elixir, gave me instant life, a jolt that shook off anemia and whatever discomfort permeated my being. The image lasted for a few moments inside the darkness of my covered eyes, like the stamped afterglow of a bright flash, and I smiled back at nothing apparent, secretly playing out the fantastical connection and mutual desire with loving concentration, until her gaseous portrait dissolved before the star prickled black of my inner universe. My strength returned as the ride came to an end, and I was glad it was over.

I felt better from her warm glance and the gradual deceleration. I wiped away what remained of the regurgitated fair cuisine, but the smell and biological art stuck around. She had probably seen my sickness and frightful pallor during the ride’s climax, but I guess she found my panic and puke-stained chest endearing, for as the cars came to a full stop and the passengers dismounted, she ran over, beaming with the lingering rush, placing her arms around my brother and me, giggling approval. She turned to me and winked at my face, which had now lost its pastiness and wore an island burn.

She squeezed me and said, “Pobrecito.”

Poor little one. Yes, that was me. She didn’t care that I was sick. She stayed close despite my mess and odor.  Could I love her more? I smiled with chin-in-the-chest shyness and walked on, thankful to have survived the Tilt-a-Whirl but anxious about my next move.

I bought a soda at the nearest concession stand, taking a few moments to recover from my personal midway trauma. I offered everyone a drink, but I asked her twice, as if she hadn’t heard me the first time. They politely declined, she twice, so I swallowed my drink and sucked on the ice for strength.

“Wasn’t that great?” she asked, gleaming, out of breath.

“Loved it!” I lied, fully recovered, marveling at her perfect teeth.

 “What’s next then?” She was ready for more, and so was I.

To think that she’d be crazy about me in a couple of weeks! Inconceivable but factual. The birth of my pathology.

As we walked through the midway, recuperating, I wished for a moment of enchanted suspension, a cerulean bubble that would allow me, without a word, to convey it all through feeling and spirit. If only she could feel what lived in me, the great talent of this bursting heart, the complete devotion to her felicity and fulfillment, she would follow me blindly without doubt or reservation.

I felt this precisely, and I was aware that my thoughts were nothing like most of the people who sought her attention. I know I am very different, always have been, and I believe those who have come into my life have felt this and been drawn to my profound well of emotion, sentimentality, genuine affection, and general NEUROSIS.  In Rousseau’s Confessions, he claims that he is not made like any other man in existence. He adds that he may not be better, but he is undoubtedly cast from a singular mold, a mold destroyed after his birth. The idea that every one of us is different is criminally obvious and boring, but when I read this, I understood exactly what he meant. Rousseau was speaking of something deeper—a formidable, solitary and often frightening knowledge of uniqueness unexplainable to anyone around me.

I listen to people, watch them deal with joy and anguish, see them at their best and worst, and the longer I live, the more I’m convinced that I am alone. Even the people closest to me, those I speak to without filter, who profess uncanny empathy and understanding, even these chosen few never make it all the way but stop just short of colliding with my core.  I’m not claiming that this in an enviable gift or strength, on the contrary, it has often served as my greatest weakness, but I would not alter a thing, for I know I have felt everything with galactic force, the smallest occurrences carrying enduring depth or poignancy, and although it has brought much grief along with the ecstasy, I, a mere speck in the big scheme, would not presume to question what is beyond me.

Snapshot: I was eight years old. I remember Diane L. She was eleven, of course, a fourth-grade crush. Those blue eyes and sweetness despite blinding popularity. I also remember one of her boyfriends, Mike Carter. I’d run into him in the bathroom sometimes.  He’d often carry a cigar box full of baby tarantulas. He’d show off these hideous things to other kids while I stood at the urinal, covering my genitals, pissing all over myself, thinking of those hairy, segmented legs tickling the wrinkled skin on my shrinking scrotum. He was always soiled and smelly, but the less he cared, the more he’d score. Anyway, I remember thinking: “What is she doing?” My Persephone, fragrant with the bloom of spring, fresh in cotton and bare feet, in the clutches of this plebian, pre-pubescent Hades! My 4^th grade teacher, Mrs. Burns, was nuts about Greek mythology. Mike’s grimy, sticky fingers touched her. Those long, nicotine-yellow nails, full of dirt, decaying boogers and spider shit, made contact with her perfect skin.  He was foul and treated her with indifference. I knew I could make her feel special, that I could show her a world where, as the central figure, she would receive the attention and focused audience she deserved. And I bathed daily.

 I thought of us gliding over wide-open meadows, silver streams, flowery hills and faithful, old trees. We’d roll around and touch and feel it all. We’d talk about how dreams and made-up places were more real than prime numbers and cheerleading practice—and why she couldn’t like me in that other world, the one my mother woke me up to every morning with a bowl of soggy cornflakes and Chek cola, and why ballads made me cry when they spoke of things that moved me but I hadn’t yet lived (I have several diary entries dated 1978 to prove this).

I’d go home and listen to my K-Tell’s ‘50’s compilation, The Idols of Rock-n-Roll, daydreaming, thinking misty thoughts. I was a punk in the 70’s listening to love songs from the 50’s. I loved the innocence and simplicity of that era. The songs were about the little things, but the little things have always meant everything. Paul Anka’s “Diana” wailed from my small bedroom, and I’d sit and fantasize about Diane and others, spending hours imagining their home lives, following them home after school from a plastic-covered armchair in my sad living room. I splashed in their pools, sat on hampers watching their bed and bath routines, ate fresh, warm cookies baked just for me, and cuddled by faux fireplaces in garage-converted Florida rooms, asking important questions that never took real form and had no answers, like forgotten dreams in the early morning hours.  I often wondered why the boys I knew had no interest in wanting to really know these mysterious humans, no desire to delve into their minds and souls, attempting to unravel some of the unknowable. Maybe these thoughts and experiences are not original or precocious, even for an eight-year-old, but the depth of sentiment was incongruous with my age and the times. I have always taken it harder than anyone I’ve known, but I have also taken more from it than anyone I’ve known. For me, it has always come so easily, but, invariably, the idyll evaporates or explodes. Months after the Tilt-A-Whirl debacle and my eventual triumph, it ended, epically, its climax colorful, transformative, transcendent, infinite, like David Bowman’s final cosmic journey in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

And here I am again, in love, amid the mystery and mystification of middle age, as John Cheever wrote. It is May 31, 2026. This is the real thing. Authentic magic once and for all. This genuine article. My alabaster queen. Her dark honey. I’m all in, and so is she. See you on the other side.