Lovesick

So. I'm in my office on Sunday afternoon, getting some paperwork done and listening to This American Life on NPR. This is one of my favorite Sunday rituals, quietly drinking a cup of coffee and hearing in depth stories on different themes every week.

Today's program is themed on taped messages that were meant for one person, and one person only, to hear. As I've filed leases, entered things for reports I have to run tomorrow and surfed the internet I've laughed at the phone message a mother left for her son while he was away at college and shivered listening to the soldier under an artillery attack in Iraq leaving what he thought might be the last message for his wife and son. Then, I had to stop and listen to the last story.

A man in New York had met a woman in Italy and wanted her to come visit him. His idea was to make a tape for her to hear him as he went about his average day. He began by telling her about his apartment, strumming his bass for her to hear as he walked by-then he went outside and described the busload of Chinese tourists swirling around him on the sidewalk. He whispered into the recorder while he was at rehearsal, sneaking his words under the swelling of the violin, creating such an intimacy that I was slightly embarrassed and felt like a voyeur, looking into this man's heart. At one point he picks up his narrative after he's read her very first letter to him since they parted, and his voice breaks as he tells her how he can't believe he's in love with her already.

This caught me, since when I'm just learning someone I'm intensely interested in the minutae of their life. I want to hear them as they talk to their pets or friends, I want to know how they take their coffee and what the perfect shower temperature is for them. I can sit rapt for up to an hour or so, just hearing them talk about their day at work, bad day or good day makes no difference, I just want to picture them as they were 2 hours earlier. Those things are what make up people, not the outward persona that we show to aquaintances. It's the tiny phrases we utter, the small habits we develop that make us fall in love.

Sunday October 15, 2006 - 02:09pm (EDT)