1.
Over her shoulder she glanced. Her smile flashed; she was looking at someone she knew. Her dark hair brushed her shoulders, moved by a breeze that was not present. She leaned against the dark red bar talking with two friends, who did not interest me. I watched her and I was drawn to her.
She turned back towards her friends, and again her hair splashed on her shoulders. I felt something that I hadn’t felt in a very long time. It was the feeling of being pulled to something, to someone potently and powerfully. It was gravity. Gravity had been my obsession for more than a year now. I first became interested in it because of moments like this; moments when objects are inevitably drawn together so strongly they must collide. The world of gravity is huge and vast. It includes everything: philosophy, science, theory, relationships, society, and, well, just about everything.
She turned again, and this time she looked right at me. I looked back at her. We saw each other. She smiled. I was caught completely off guard, and attempted a recovery with a pathetic sort of grin that only assisted in revealing how uncomfortable, how scared, I really was. Surprisingly, her smile flashed brighter, and with her head and her dancing hair she asked me to come.
The bar was crowed. The Drawing Room is always crowded now. There was a time, not too long ago, when it was old drunks and east side geeks, but it was now a part of the hipster bar circuit, always in search of cheap drinks and more historical, seemingly authentic odors. Despite the crowd, I floated through the bar. Twisting, turning, rolling and gliding, I moved towards her.
Gravity began as an idea, a philosophy, in a time when anything scientific was philosophical. The world was something that was thought about, and proofs were simply good arguments. The first historical and written observation of gravity is found in ancient India. Kanada, a philosopher and teacher, noted that things with mass attracted things with less mass. Kanada, pronounced like Canada (which isn’t a real country, but retains more patriotism than most countries – compensate much?), was the founder of a school of thought known as Vaisheshika. It was a logic system and most of the work of its philosophers was to understand the phenomenal world through observation and inference.
Kanada said, “Weight causes falling; it is imperceptible and known by inference.” Inference is based on historical observation. Kanada observed, much like Newton, that things always fell down – or at least down in our point of reference. More accurately, things always fell to earth, and the earth was always much bigger than what fell towards it.
Through inference, Kanada reasoned that the object with the biggest mass had the most weight and weight was the primary motivator for gravity, which he called gurutva. Interestingly, gurutva was later used to explain the attractive quality a guru had over a student – the almost heavenly and otherworldly pull a guru has on those that are devoted.
I walked across the bar in a devotional trance, mesmerized by her every movement.
I became interested in gravity because of this – moments when I was pulled across a bar, through a massive crowd of loud, drunk, twirling people. Why were things, both physically and energetically, drawn to each other? I had been studying and writing for over a year, and yet I could still not explain what pulled me across the room and why I was pulled. Like Kanada said, “Weight causes falling; it is imperceptible and known by inference.” What drew me to her was imperceptible. There were the obvious things: her beauty, her smile, her soft radiance.
I was now just a few steps from her. The chaos of the bar that drank too much had slowed to a stand still. The almost deafening shouting of conversation became complete silence, and the oceanic lean and rolling of the crowd became motionless, still. Again, she turned. Our eyes again met. She smiled. My heart stopped. I swallowed. I stood before her.
If you call an operator, you can talk for hours with someone listening. According to law, they are not allowed to hang up. It’s best when you find someone more conversational, but in the least it’s nice to have an ear on the other end listening.
“Hi,” I said. Her smile grew and spread across her face. I felt warm and scared. I felt the fear that only such penetrating warmth could produce – what if I never felt it again?
“Hi,” she said.
“Philos. My name is Philos.” I used to despise my name. It seemed lame. I spent most of my life introducing myself as Phil, which also seemed lame. I am not sure if the encompassing sense of lameness came first, and produced my feelings about the name, or if it came as a result of the lameness of the name, but I have spent most of my life feeling lame. I suppose most do, or feel, in the least, ordinary. That’s how I felt now, graduating from lame to ordinary, which is not much progress.
“Wisdom. Your name means wisdom, in Greek. It’s beautiful.” She thinks my name is beautiful? “Sophia. My name is Sophia.” Her name means love in Greek!
“You’re name means love in Greek.”
“Yes, I know. Philos?”
“Yes?”
“You’re still holding my hand.”
He stood there holding my hand, Philos. I could feel the warmth of his skin, the moister of this nervousness, and the beat of his insecure heart in the clench of his palm, pressed against mine. He held on for fear of letting go. I let him hold me, my hand, for fear of reaching out again. I feign confidence. It’s something I am not.
“Your name is sometimes translated as love, though, Philos.”
“Yes, of course. Depending on the context.
“And my name is sometimes translated as wisdom, of course, depending on the context.”
He released my hand slowly with caution, as if doing so would disturb the balance of our micro-universe to the point of causing collapse, chaos. He still held me with his gaze, pulling my closer. The space between us was rich with stories – stories that reach back and forward a thousand years. Stories forever. And it’s with these stories our relationship began. Stories, weaving themselves in silence, are the genesis of all relationships.
With his gaze, he held me. There was a magnetism; a palpable, undeniable magnetism between us. One the reached well beyond a pretty face or a fuckable body. It was the magnetism of penetrating desire that rarely showed itself between two people – at least rare in my small life. With Philos, I felt something, and Philos and me have only known each other for a minute now.
“You’re not too bright, are you?” I questioned him. I smiled. Something in me flirted.
“Probably not. No. But there is light in me, nonetheless, and I think that’s what is important.”
“I feel that I need to know you,” I said. He makes me feel porous and gitty. I also feel slightly intoxicated.
“Yes. I think so too. When I saw you across the room, just a moment ago, I was compelled towards proximity. I needed to be closer to you.”
“I feel slightly intoxicated.”
“Have a glass of water.”
“I’m not sure it’s the liquor.”
I wasn’t sure if it was the liquor, though Jennifer was being luxurious and decadent in her pouring. Philos was now something I needed.
“Well, Philos, will you be wisdom or love, in this context?”
“I suppose we’ll see.”
“I suppose we will.”
“It’s not the liquor?”
“No.”
Sixty-three miles above the Earth’s surface weightlessness begins. I am in Los Feliz, California, approximately 460 feet above sea level, feeling completely raptured: spinning, floating, rolling, gliding, ducking and twisting – arrogantly defying Newton’s laws of motion. There is no up or down. There is open, free, liberated space. It is in space that our celestial bodies collided in heavenly embrace. In observation, it would have been as insignificant as a fly landing on an orange or an airplane touching down on the tarmac, but to me it was the most significant connection of my life.
And then reality continues.
“What is it then?” I asked.
“I think I like you,” she said.
“You barely know me.” Maybe I should not talk her out of this. Who cares if she barely knows me – fuck, that’s probably why she likes me.
The bar was loud. I normally didn’t like this. The constant inner-ear pin pricks of glasses, jukebox tunes, voices, conversation, all spinning, reeling, and working towards the creation of experience and meaning: an insane orgasmic symphony of distraction. Tonight, it is welcomed. For tonight, so that I can hear her, she presses her body into mine. Her breath and voice tickle my ear and my inner stomach, somehow, as she leans in.
“I don’t need to know you. I can feel you. That’s all I need, Philos.”
“In perhaps loving you, I will know you,” I said, and I don’t know why I said it. Those words didn’t really make sense to me. For no more than five minutes, we’d talked. I already spoke of love – it felt reckless and wreaked of juvenile arrogance.
“In perhaps knowing you, I will love you,” she said.
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