This is something different.

If It Is Sweet was launched in May, 2009. The following February I was asked to do something about Valentine's Day for a television show. It would involve Michael, as well. He said 'No.' By this time I had taken part in more media coverage unrelated to my book than coverage related to my book. And yet I feared that if I said 'no' I would be consigning my book to forgotten history. Thank god for Michael and that 'No.'

But it seems I'm back on the promotion track. Earlier this year, Grazia India asked me to do a Valentine's Day piece. Needless to say I didn't ask Michael. I told myself he would like being surprised. They didn't run it. I heaved a sigh of relief. They ran it last month. This morning he showed me his face book page. He'd posted the the photobooth pictures we'd taken at my sister-in-law's wedding there. His argument for sharing it: he was celebrating our anniversary. Our seventeenth was over Sarah's wedding weekend. So I don't have to hide my Grazia piece anymore.

A long ways into our pact of faith I am still prone to falling in love, and not only with Michael. The world is after all full of the irresistable. But as Cseslaw Milosz says   'Falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different.' Or as Michael sang at the wedding, 'vahii.n thamke rah ga'ii hai... rah ga'ii hai...'

****

From "The One", Grazia India, June, 2012

I fell in love with Michael at first sight. He was wearing a bright blue rain slicker. It was raining outside the window through which I saw him park his bicycle.

I was a scared, and in many ways young twenty-three, waiting at the window of my office for the leader of a workforce that wished to form a trade union. Six months on, the campaign we led was a failure. Most of the workers who had fought to form the union had either left or been driven out from the workplace by the employer’s campaign of terror. An election was held and the trade union I worked for, decertified. I moved in with Michael, and saw him off to work at 5 every morning. And yes, it seemed like it was raining every one of those mornings as he pedalled away to work another day at what I thought of as the site of our personal and political defeat. It took me a long time and much reflection to understand that hanging on to hope, a hope made resilient in struggle, is not only an act of courage but actually a necessary expression of humanity.

Now when I try to decipher ‘love at first sight’ it is impossible to do so without all the images of Michael that I have gathered over the last eighteen years overlaying that first glimpse of the beloved face. But the blue of that rain slicker lives on. And with it, memory, to convince me that it was so. Lightning did strike. My knees did tremble.