iMeet Cute | ✓

↺ 023 : golden autumn leaves & origami hearts

"Tell me what your tattoo says."

"Don't know. It's not in English."

"Uh-huh, that's definitely English." He neared me again. "H...h u? A?" Nash rubbed his eyes. "This is fucking blurry."

"Hide your face amid a crowd of stars," I told him. "It's based on a poem by William Butler Yeats."

"When You Are Old?"

"You know the poem?"

"It's one of my favorites." He was suddenly interested in the small bookshelf above his reading table. "I have a collection of poetry. I write the ones I can resonate with in this book-sometimes I jot down a few lines, other times I glue cutouts in. It's the messiest scrapbook I've ever seen." He met my eyes for a brief second. "You don't think that's weird, do you?"

"No-"

"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways-that's another favorite. I can't exactly pick a favorite when there are so many good ones, but if I was put on the spot, it'd be the one Kaylee and Jonah collabed on."

Well, Nash was rambling, which could only mean two things. 1. He was drunk, or 2. He was nervous. Could've been both, but I'd put my money on the first.

He, with the messy scrapbook of poetry that had been collected over the years, joined me on his twin bed.

"You're like, a love fanatic," I said, moments later. I'd flipped through about half of his scrapbook, murmuring the hastily scrawled words under my breath. Nash's handwriting was a sort of super messy cursive, but it was readable.

"I'm not the one with W.B. Yates' words inked onto their skin."

"Not his exact words, and they don't even have romantic undertones." I flipped a page. "Hey, I know this one."

Nash followed my line of sight to a patch of old college lined paper adorned with a doodle of an umbrella above a single paragraph. "Lenore, you are strongly mistaken if you think When You Are Old doesn't have romantic undertones. But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you?"

"One line."

"No, twelve lines. You think that one line would make any sense without its surrounding text?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. One man loved the pilgrim soul in you. The end. Take it out of the poem and you still have a poem. Take love out of humanity and you still have-"

"Heartless people."

"No, you have a loveless race, but these people still hold the ability to feel other emotions."

"A loveless race is a lifeless race. How do you procreate without emotional involvement?"

"You hook up."

"Ninety-six percent of no strings attached sexual relationships end with attached strings or because one party developed feelings somewhere along the way. Love is am important factor in human relations. You can't just yeet it out of existence and expect things to remain the same."

"So you mean to say that a person who likes to, um, screw around, falls in love with everyone they get down with?"

I hoped to see him falter, but he did not. Disappointing.

"I never said that. There are tons of different reasons why a person would opt to seek fulfilment by having multiple sexual partners, but this has nothing to do with emotional involvement between parties, and most of the time, it doesn't end in production of offspring."

This argument was already out of my hands. There was no winning. Tipsy Odin was too full of information. Most of it might've not been credible, but I didn't have a chance to make sure.