Dating : I met a famous author

I met the famous author again the week following for a walk through the Park. She had with her a large book. As far as I could tell, the book was blank, and though she did not acknowledge its presence, she carried it with purpose.

Walking turned to dinner; “Are you always this excited?” she asked me, unknowingly referencing the pit in my stomach. The pit was not just excitement, though excitement was there too. It was excitement and anxiety and it was fear and longing and hope and despair and somethingness and nothingness and dreams and doubt and it was a thousand worlds of what could be and what would never be, slowly collapsing and colliding and coalescing into our singular reality. “No,” I mumbled in reply, picking at the last crispy nubs of crinkle cut fries, “just with you.”

Dinner turned to sitting across from each other on the sofa of her writing studio, legs intertwined. We filled in more of the blank and ripped out pages of our lives, and suddenly she handed me the book she had been carrying with us all afternoon. I examined the cover — though I initially believed it to be blank, I found it now to be extremely detailed and full of color. I opened it and found that it had but a single page. Despite this, the book was as heavy as a tome, weighed down by histories both past and future. The single page felt enormous — an expanse of never-ending dimensions. In the center were three small words.

Please marry me

But the words did not really say Please marry me, they said Please marry me. But not quite Please, they anguished PLEASE! marry me. Though they were small, the words managed to fill the page, repeated and repeated. And perhaps the words were not small at all, perhaps those three words were so large that they filled the whole page. Perhaps they were the page, and I was only imagining the spaces between the letters, just as we were imagining the space between each other.