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How to Fall in Love

by Melissa Swantkowski

Touching is a human thing. I don’t mean touching like with your boyfriend or with your mother when her uterine cancer comes back even though she doesn’t have a uterus anymore because they took it out the last time. That can happen, you know. Microscopic cells can be left behind and after weeks or months or even years can wake up and grow again into the pelvis or around the intestines. This is generally very bad.

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What I mean is the touching that happens in a museum where there are “Please Do Not Touch” signs in bold print all over and your touching happens in between two of them. You are touching something like a Renaissance painting or an ancient stone column without even realizing it. Sometimes no one notices your touching, not even the guards. Or sometimes, the only people that notice are other museum goers who are just glad they are not the ones doing the touching. Sometimes everyone notices your touching and you are asked to leave.

Or the green and purple cabbages that grow outside fancy buildings. These are not the kind of cabbages grown on farms and sold to grocery stores, but cabbages grown just to look at. But if you didn’t know that, and you walked by, you might touch their leaves or even try to pick one. Especially if you were hungry.

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What I mean is the touching that happens before you even know it.

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In the emergency room, they sometimes have to take your temperature. They do this with a thin piece of glass in your rear end. Sometimes the nurse will ask if you want to insert it yourself, but listen to me, it is much more comfortable to just lie there and think about other things. One thing that is really nice to think about is the Zen Progression Alarm Clock^TM. That is, an alarm clock with a mini gong that gently wakes you from sleep instead of beeping like a regular digital alarm, or playing an annoying song like a cell phone or blasting news into your ear like a clock-radio or ringing like one of those old-fashioned round clocks with the bells on top. How it works is, you set it for ten minutes before you really have to get up and the gong goes off at specific time intervals until finally it is gonging continuously. I don’t have the intervals memorized, but if you looked in the Information and Instruction Manual that comes with the Zen Progression Alarm Clock^TM, you could find out.

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