Sometimes you just know you're in a good and right place. You need to figure out how to chart it: determine its coordinates, its characteristics, its directions so you can find your way back.

There is a chance in the metaphor. An educated guess at understanding what is going on. Don't you think? To say it's a game discounts the import of its value. To express things not entirely directly opens paths to integration and acceptance often not given to a direct approach. To offer someone the opportunity to feel they have discovered a truth themselves rather than be given an answer increases its value and ownership.

How do you think of me when I am away? I mean how do you picture me? What position? Doing what? What kind of facial expression? A current image of me or of me when we first met? Is it an image from a photograph or from some specific or generalized moment? I’m not saying it's always necessarily the same one. I’m just wondering about the visual fix we hold of each other when we are apart.

What differentiates a decision, an empowered choice, from an inevitable consequence of events? Which is choice? Which is personal?
What is a steered course and what is following a current?

Now what if all this was a test for the real thing...

There are parameters we could set. Descriptors of desired states for each of us: visual, emotional, logistical, sensual, mathematical. We could discuss politics, expectations, the sense of possibility in the air.
And yet at that point I was still puzzled and too overwhelmed by these tentative but intense initial contacts. Was your response unique to me? Were you always so, apparently, sweet and effusive in compliments and gracious in your manner? Am I missing something? At what point should I stop pinching myself or stop thinking of you?

So this is where it could begin.
A simple understanding of what each of us is holding in our hand is the exact same thing. One half each of the same pear. The same color. The same texture. The same scent. The potential of the same flavor as not yet savored. Maybe a Bosc. Maybe a couple days before its ideal flavor and freshness. Maybe not but still the same.

All of a sudden, life got very small. Your touch, not to be mistaken, lifted, and as if a certain falling from grace having taken with it the dream, the possibility, the delusion...