“Love breaks things. Maybe it’s a stupid thing to say, but it does. When it first happens to you your world shatters into a million glowing splinters, tearing back the veil and making everything feel new all over again. When it ends your world shatters again, but where there was magic before there is blood and tears in the wreckage.”

~Anonymous

I am in the library, watching her choose a book. Her wandering is a coy gait, hands behind her back, swinging her head around every so often so that her long, wavy locks swing past her cheek and I see her immaculately freckled face and glittering, mischievous eyes. We have been perusing the stacks for a good twenty minutes. Normally I’d be shit full of moving so slow, not knowing what we are here for. Who simply wanders into a situation of a thousand choices having no idea what to look for? Who wants to take a risk on reading a terrible book? This game we’re playing is more than just finding a book, though. The rules are clear, written in the tension that keeps us in sight of each other.

We are in the graphic novel section and I am pulling trade paperbacks of superheroes of the shelves, grinning as she rolls her eyes at every suggestion I make. Hard chiseled faces, enormous breasts and disproportionately muscled heroes and heroines. She pulls her mouth tight and glowers at me, and each time there is a little charge of excitement. We enact this ritual through the poetry section, fiction, science and biology, and what the hell are we actually doing here teasing each other with books on Herpetology, Sylvia Plath, Hemingway?

We are back in poetry and she pulls a book gently, looking down at the cover. I can see the light behind her illuminate her irises in profile, see the clear bulb of the lens of her eye and the freckles of brown in the blue-green pools. Her hand touches the cover gently and for the first time she opens the book, flipping through page after page. Reading one or two lines at a time, maybe, and then flipping to another. I stand behind her and look over her shoulder, but I’m not reading the words, just touching them with my eyes and feeling the weight of her hair and warmth of her head against my face. Her cheek pulls toward me slightly, head tilted to expose the skin on her neck, clues to a faint smile. She pretends to ignore me and keeps reading. We stay like this for a few minutes, the library around us is quiet except for the distant sound of book carts squeaking, the beeping of the scanners at circulation, fingers clacking against keyboards, soft murmur of voices.

I kiss her cheek to break the reverie. The game is over, I’m ready for the next one. She closes the book and turns, looks at me, and kisses my cheek in turn. My face heats up and a smile bubbles up. I take her hand and she walks me to the circulation desk where she puts the book on the counter and smiles. The clerk scans the book, glancing up at the two of us through time worn eyes and a thin, warm smile. She stamps the cover, closes it and hands it across the counter. With one finger and a squinted, full-toothed smile she wags it at us in good bye and we wave, walking out to the car and whatever we choose to do with ourselves next.