later."
"I understand," he says, and looks down at her. He grabs her hand, caresses her fingers. "You know, when I first saw you, I was immediately taken with you. I don't want to pretend that I've been making comparisons, but you reminded me of Melissa. I've been a little afraid that these things I'd been feeling—this obsessive longing to see you again, to be as near to you as often as possible—might be some kind of transference on my part. I've been spending a lot of time trying to get my past back recently, trying to bring back all those things I was feeling when I wrote Imeros, to wake up some of those old inspirations, and I worried that, through you, I was trying to bring her back somehow."
Joelle stands up and moves toward him, she rests her warm, soft hand against his face. "It would make me happy to know that I could give you a fraction of what Melissa gave you."
"But I wasn't able to keep what Melissa gave me."
"Maybe you can find in me what you lost with her. Maybe you'll keep me."
"Maybe," he says.
He places his hands on her hips, pulls her closer, and kisses her softly on the mouth.
She leans her head into his head. "I'm going to fall in love with you, Jacob. There's no stopping it now."
"I know."
The day after Jacob revealed his feelings to Melissa, he couldn't go a minute without thinking of her, wanting desperately to be near her. During quiet moments he would try to picture her face, but couldn't quite grasp its definition. He would try to remember the sound of her voice, or how she moved, but nothing came close to sating his desire. So, he spent that evening walking around campus, trying to find a valid reason to go to her, to spend a few precious seconds with her.
But he waited. He knew that if there was any chance that she was breaking off her engagement, then he needed to give her whatever space she needed.
By the next morning, as he sat and waited for her at the library, he was so tired that the world was under the gauze of dreamlight. He spent the entire night staring into the darkness, thinking of the things he was going to say to her. All the words that poured over him made him feel like he had been an empty vessel before he met her, and now he was being filled full to the point of bursting.
He can still feel that rush of finally seeing her there, standing outside the library in the pouring rain. He thought it looked like she might be crying, but the rain is a tricky predictor. She was looking at him with her usual singular intensity, and he got caught in those big, brown eyes of hers. He couldn't tell from her expression if she was sad or merely serious, but he got the impression that she had been up all night as well, and that the world she was watching was cast in the same dreamlight of his world.
Without a worry of the rain, he walked outside to her. His recollection of walking toward her could really be from any day, but he thinks of it as that day. The day she showed him that her ring was gone, and that she was free.
And all the words that had been floating above them the night before fell on them like the rain, and they tried, as best as they could, to articulate the enormity of their need, the hunger they felt. And when she fell into him, her wet body clinging to his wet body, they just kissed and kissed and kissed, never once thinking of returning to shelter.
And those kisses were, suddenly, like waking up, being reborn, moving effortlessly into a brighter place, a place you might imagine when you imagine home. There was no world other than their world, and no time outside of that time.
He has no further memory of it raining that day. All he remembers is sunshine, a world flooded with light. But memory can cast a blurry projection onto particular days, often reflecting more the mood of the day than the day's reality.
But they did spend the remainder of that day together, missing classes, missing meals, and, yet, completely unaware that they'd missed anything at all. They walked around campus, either intoxicated by each other, or just buzzed from the fatigue of a sleepless night. But he can say with absolute certainty that he never knew an elevation quite like that, and hasn't since.
He remembers that, later in the evening, she told him how difficult it was going to be to tell her family about breaking off her engagement, and how tricky it was going to be to introduce him into that part of her life—her family life—under the circumstances.
This was probably the first real injection of reality into their day, and he felt that her family situation was something to be feared if she was warning him about them already. It spoke to the seriousness of her feelings for him, but, also, it foretold the possible discord to come. And the possibility of facing those problems with her family was something he never stopped worrying about.
Melissa was born into wealth, and he assumed, rightly, that her fiancé also came from a wealthy family. She told Jacob that her family had pushed for the engagement, and that they had been ecstatic about the upcoming union. And Jacob could see why. He always assumed that wealth wedded wealth, largely out of each individual's sense of entitlement. The wealthy people Jacob has known are so accustomed to the comfortable life that they're desperate to preserve their status. And their families are no different, hoping to preserve and pass on their ease of life to their children. So, when two wealthy families see a chance for a socioeconomic match, there is a not-so-subtle gravity applied that pulls their children to each other.
Jacob, on the other hand, was born without wealth. Not just relative to Melissa, but relative to just about everyone he knew. He was born and raised in various low-income apartment complexes, and had come to college only after receiving a number of loans and grants. Even with the extra help, he was still barely able to stay enrolled from quarter to quarter, always finding a way to remain in school by the skin of his teeth, and with nothing to spare.
He worked two jobs in the evenings to keep him on campus, and had largely grown accustomed to his poverty, so much so that it became a personal source of pride. He was pleased to play the part of the poor poet. There's no doubt that the role made him more desirable to the girls in his social circle—mostly literary types. But, because of what his station, and chosen profession, foretold, he knew that many of these girls would never see him as the marrying type. His future was too uncertain, which, in turn, made him too risky as a serious love interest. He always felt like the college girls he dated looked at him like he was a lesser man, and, though it is possible that he may have imagined those looks out of a natural insecurity, he always felt that they believed he would stay poor—as poor people have a habit of doing.
Melissa never looked at him that way. When he was with her, they were equals. Equals looking down on everyone else from their emotional heights.
And the truth is, he had no idea what it was to be a poet until he spent those early days with Melissa. Being with her, unburdening all his penned up emotions on her, made him say things that would embarrass most people to hear, let alone say out loud. But losing that filter, that voice in his head that kept him from describing his emotions in such a starkly naked way, made him really know that a poet existed within him. It was then that he stopped playing the part of the poet, and just assumed the role.
When they were together—and they were rarely apart—they would say things to each other that truly felt like they came freely from the heart, and those words felt like the truest words he'd ever spoken, and it made all the world's words more accessible because he was no longer afraid to express the truth in a thought. It used to be that he was intimidated by his lack of words, his inability to describe something with the precision of perfect words. Not anymore.
After being with Melissa, and not being able to come close to describing how he truly felt for her—all words fell short of perfect—he understood that poetry was simply an approximation of things, a way of describing echos of this's and that's, perceptions painted on impressions.
Melissa made him a poet.
Loving her made him understand where poems were made.
In the days that followed his office meeting with Joelle, Jacob spent a lot of
time comparing the time he had spent with Melissa to the time he's spent with Joelle.
He's sure that he's felt hints of that old elevation again. He finds it easy to go from normal to spontaneously happy when thinking of Joelle. Particularly when he knows he's about to see her. But on those days when, for whatever reason, they're going to be apart—knowing that she's going to be with Brad, playing the perfect fiancée—he feels sick, and can't think of anything but the space between them.
The situation with Joelle is so fluid, and it naturally leads to wild swings of emotions. One minute, he's convinced that they're doomed when they're apart too long, but then, when he anticipates seeing her again, he's dancing inside. One day he feels that they can't possibly go on, and then, the next day, he tells himself how lucky he is to experience such joie de vivre in middle age. And those little reminders of love's beginnings are what keep him pushing forward, even with all the uncertainty that surrounds them. His hope is that these youthful insecurities will save him from the natural cynicism of his age, and that it could ultimately be what revives his poetic life.
When he is with her, he is reminded of those early days spent with Melissa, whispering the weight of their wishes into the air of each kiss. He hears those same