Ah.  Love, you tricky devil.  One minute can stretch to be years.  One year can shink to mean nothing, just as the taste of tannin and cherries in your mouth fades as you pop the cork off the next bottle of wine.  Deep reds fade to light pinks, fade to off whites with each rinse cycle.  Treasuring that spill of red wine on your favorite shirt for months, years, maybe decades.

How things can sneak up on you though, like a burglar wishing to hold you and kiss your arm sweetly as you fall asleep.  Someone who is there to care for you but you push off out of fear.  They come masked but over time the mask comes off and you are no longer sleeping with a stranger, you are sleeping with a loved one.  What if the mask is never on though?  What is they are who they looked like when they fell accidentally into your life?

These crumpled up sheets of paper lie on my floor, each one has a different angle of your face sketched out in words.  However they have a scale of 1:5000, there is no way my words could describe in detail the delicate contours that I’ve gotten to know.  The contours that have been there but never so near.  The contours I’ve observed as you woke and opened your eyes, causing me to shyly look away and giggle a little bit.

I’ve learned that with careful sipping and deep breaths that bottle can last far beyond oenophiles predictions.  When decanted carefully and enjoyed thoroughly you don’t have to look at opening a bottle as starting the expiration of it’s contents but more as a new taste, a new angle on how beautiful each day can be and how simply each day can end.  And when a conversation is the corkscrew, and the bottle it is decanted in is equally amazing and equally abstract, it’s flavors cannot be estimated or ignored.  With nuances of shared experiences (together or apart), random eye catches and late night conversations.  I’m excited to share swirling, breathing and sipping, rather than completely terrified that the bottle is going to run out and I’ll be left with grape peels and empty arms.

I realize that this writing is flighty and jumps around a lot but this requires no commitment.  This is love, this is friendship, this needs no rules and it doesn’t need weights to pull it down.  The point here is that rather than worrying about the bottom of the bottle and the grape skins, let’s rejoice in the flavors of the moment and the appeal of the product.  However, let’s remember to decant it and put it aside because time makes things better.  Hardly ever worse.