Infatuation: Petals on an Empty Floor

Song: Dreams Tonite by Alvvays

Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. — Proverbs 4:23

I believe there are certain people we meet — rare and fleeting — who awaken something in us we never knew was sleeping. They are not meant to stay. They arrive like sparks across the sky, pulling us just far enough to feel fully: the depth of longing, the sharpness of desire, the warmth of intimacy. These connections are temporary, yet real. They remind us of the emotions safety keeps hidden, revealing what has been missing all along. In their presence, we glimpse the edges of our own hearts — the parts we have hidden, the emotions we have tucked away, and when they leave, the cord loosens, yet the memory of that awakening lingers. A reminder that life asks more than comfort, and that the heart is capable of more than it dares to claim.

In my early twenties, I ran four miles every day — not for sport, but to escape a life that already felt too small. I ate alone, not out of habit but out of necessity. I read alone. I filled journals in solitude, pouring empty pages full of thoughts and fears I had no one to share with, even while I existed within a relationship with my ex. I rarely ate, consumed by work and by the pressure my parents placed on me to marry Jay. I would be ready to go to sleep, and my mother would come in, reading a book about why I should marry young, all the while I was simply trying to figure out who I was, who I wanted to be, and how to live a life that felt like mine.

His relentless insistence on marriage — on rings, on promises I was not ready to make — made every conversation feel like a trap, every argument a reminder of the life he envisioned, a life I knew I could not give without losing myself in the process. He was planning trips, dreaming of traveling the world after just visiting New York, and I was exhausted. He had these big, ambitious plans, and all I wanted was to curl up and watch a good movie. The idea of walking down that aisle, of binding myself to a future that felt rushed and irreversible, the thought pressed down on me, a cage closing around my chest. So I ran. Not just through the streets in the early morning, but from the suffocating expectations of love imposed on me. I ran from a life that was not mine, and in that running, I withdrew. I learned to survive in the spaces between conversations, in the pauses where I could still imagine another life — one that belonged entirely to me at twenty-two.

It was when I met River. I stepped into a hole-in-the-wall café, and there he sat in the corner, as if the universe had turned a spotlight just on him. My eyes could not help but follow, tracing the way he moved his lips. He was speaking to someone — perhaps a friend, perhaps a coworker — and yet the moment felt suspended, as if the rest of the room had disappeared. His smile was wide, unguarded, and it told me something about him: kindness, maybe — even if it was performative, it felt real in that instant. He seemed like someone who had moved a lot. He carried experience in the ease of his posture. His skin was pale, delicate against the muted softness of the café. His eyes were a deep brown, calm yet alert, and his lips looked soft — a gentle pink that drew attention without asking for it.

There was a lightness to him, an unspoken otherness I could not name, the kind of presence that makes you stop mid-breath. Something about him made the air shift, as if in that small corner, a new possibility had appeared — one I had not known I had been waiting for. He seemed like someone who moved easily through conversation, the kind of person who did not mind debating — even if he was wrong — so long as he was convinced of his own narrative. There was a sharpness to the way he spoke, a testing of boundaries that hinted at both intelligence and playfulness. At times, it felt like he enjoyed seeing how far he could push, how much he could poke — not with cruelty, but with a curiosity that kept others slightly off balance. Yet, despite this, there was a magnetism I could not deny: a restless energy, a refusal to conform to expectation. He was not a gentleman in the conventional sense; politeness did not define him, and perhaps that was what drew me in — the unpredictability, the tension between charm and challenge, the sense that in his presence, the world was slightly more alive.

He was attractive. Tall and lean, and he carried an elegance that felt innate. His hair, curly brown — high cheekbones, a strong yet gentle jawline. But it was his eyes that held you. His presence lingered in a room before he even spoke, a gravitational pull that made it impossible to look away. There was the curve of his smile, the calculated ease in his posture, the kind of charm that felt effortless yet intentional. Every glance felt like a message, every word carefully measured to pull me in. Yet attractiveness is never merely skin-deep. A mirror for desire, a lens that bends perception. I found myself seeing only what I wanted to see. His beauty became a distraction, a charm so potent it blurred boundaries and clouded judgment. A weapon as much as a gift. I did not like it, because deep down, I knew that liking him was not a choice I could control. He wore a sweater in the heat, a golden ring on his pinky. Artsy, musical, and perhaps raised by a mother who read endlessly in a home stretched thin. He had the energy of a young sibling; I was the eldest, caring for mine and being sent to marry a man whose career seemed to define him. He seemed like someone people were drawn to care for.

And I am not describing what he looks like or what he does; I am tracing how he moves through a room, how he might have been shaped, how others respond to him. That is the mark of someone who studies people not to judge them, but to understand them.

There was something in the way he moved — effortless and fluid — that made him seem both near and untouchable. My instincts told me immediately: he was not from here. Not really. Perhaps foreign, carrying with him a presence that felt strange and magnetic in equal measure. I could feel it — someone who belonged elsewhere, and yet was suddenly, impossibly, right here. My nerves buzzed with a mixture of fear and curiosity, a recognition that the ordinary world had just tilted, and my pulse had followed him. It was the third time I went to that small café when he handed me a book — a simple gift, yet one heavy with meaning. I held it in my hands and felt a strange ache settle in my chest. Why should a book, however exquisite, be all I had of him? Grief followed closely because I knew he was leaving — a mourning for the moments I would never share, the conversations that would remain unspoken, the parts of him I would never know. And then there was the woman who owned the café. Joyless, with an attitude that clung to the room long after she passed through it. If a bad odor had a face, it was hers.

He left soon after, as casually as he had appeared, and I was left in the wake of his absence. The café suddenly felt small, too still. I wondered, as I always did, the world he moved through, and the invisible thread that had briefly connected us. The book remained in my hands — tangible and comforting, yet painfully inadequate. Is this guy psychotic? I asked myself, half in disbelief, half in awe. Clearly, he did not understand — or perhaps did not care — that making me feel was not something that happened easily, or often, or without warning. I was someone who lived behind careful walls, who measured every emotion. Yet with him, the rules did not apply. He moved through the world in a way that seemed reckless to me, challenging boundaries I did not even know I had. He stirred something inside me I thought was dormant — something sharp and unfamiliar — and for a moment, I wondered if that intensity was dangerous — or simply impossible to resist. He treated closeness like a game. It was not that he was cruel, necessarily, or that he intended harm, but he made me feel, and feeling for me was never casual. It was seismic. In his presence, I realized just how fragile the ground beneath me could feel. He sent a pulse through me I could not ignore, and I wanted to feel it fully, before it vanished, knowing I was only seeing him from one angle.

But the other angles existed too — the ones I wanted to ignore. I noticed the careful distance he kept, close enough to engage, but never crossing the invisible line. It told me he was in a relationship. I saw it in his gaze, in the way he moved — someone comfortable in his own world, yet open enough to charm those around him. He seemed like someone who liked people, who drew them in with effortless ease, and I knew I was not the only one. There were others. Always others. And still, in spite of all this, I could not stop myself from leaning into the infatuation, from wanting to feel the intensity while it lasted, knowing it was fleeting, knowing it was impossible.

I was feeling the freedom in every step — a desperate attempt to outrun the pulse in my chest, as if a red cord had been clipped to my back, yanking me backward with unrelenting force. So he had to go, because near him, I had no control — and I could not surrender that. I knew myself too well to ignore the feeling that something was off — whether it was infatuation or something darker, it had a grip on me. I began having dreams about him. I woke with a sense that something was wrong — nothing rational or clearly defined, just a heavy, ominous feeling. I had dreamed that a snake moved through my bed, and as I woke, I felt a weight near my head, as though something unseen had reached toward me. I jolted awake, my heart racing, convinced in that moment that I needed protection. I grabbed every bottle of anointing oil from the closet, acting on instinct rather than thought. Beneath the panic, beneath the fear, there was a voice that felt like my own intuition finally breaking through: give him the book back. Not supernatural — urgent. A clear signal that a boundary had been crossed, that whatever I was holding onto no longer belonged to me. My mind searched for a source — him, someone else, anything — but all I could name was the feeling itself.

I knew I was going to see him again.

I came home from work excited to meet up with my friends. I felt safe again, as if I had imagined everything, as if life could simply continue. I was smiling. I felt like I was in a good place. I was moving forward. As I walked, looking for another hole-in-the-wall café, I passed a place with a large glass window — and there he was, standing inside a different café altogether. The moment startled me, not because it meant anything, but because my body reacted before my mind could. A flash of unease rose, irrational and fleeting. Am I being watched? He lingered too near without ever truly touching my life. He occupied my space without entering it. He felt close in all the wrong ways. He was present without presence. He stood just close enough to unsettle me.

Feeling, for me, was never casual — it was costly, consuming. If he was going to awaken something in me while others lingered in the margins of his life, orbiting him through books and conversations, then I refused to be gentle about it. I wanted to disrupt the ease with which he moved through people. If he was going to make me feel exposed, then I would make him uncomfortable in return. I would become sharp where he expected softness, unpredictable where he expected charm. I wanted to scare him because I was scared. I wanted his face to pale, his hands to betray him, his composure to crack just enough for him to recognize the weight of what he had stirred. And then I wanted him gone. That was infatuation — the kind that provokes reactions instead of thoughtful responses, the kind that bypasses reason and pulls emotion straight from the gut. It was not rooted in understanding or intimacy, but in intensity, in the way feeling itself demanded movement and consequence. When I finally confronted him, I saw another shift cross his face. The charm wavered. What surfaced instead was frustration, then anger, because he could no longer control the narrative. He could no longer shape the moment to his advantage or soften it with wit and distance. When I saw him again, I returned the book — not because I did not love it, but because I loved it too much to let it become tethered to something fleeting. I am wired not to carry with me what is unable to endure. When I feel safe enough to stop hiding, then I can ask to be held — without fear, without force. Only then can closeness feel like choice, not survival.

That is why River was safest at the edge of imagination. There, he existed as possibility rather than consequence, desire rather than demand. You could learn from the idea of him without paying the cost of knowing him fully, and some men are not meant to be approached first with the body, but with the mind — where you can decide, without pressure, whether closeness is worth the change it brings. Before returning the book, I looked over every page, waiting for it to feel charged — for meaning to bloom, simply because it had passed through his hands first. But instead I felt numb. Not disappointed exactly — just aware. It did not feel special, did not feel like a doorway. It felt like something I should have experienced more deeply and somehow could not. I turned the pages knowing there was an expectation I was not meeting, a feeling I was supposed to have and did not. To see from many angles is to lose the innocence of single meaning. You are rarely surprised, rarely undone. You understand too much, too quickly. And sometimes that understanding costs you the simple pleasure of being moved without explanation, of letting something matter before you decide whether it should. Every word in the book he gave me felt alive — intense, but not overtly romantic. I saw something he valued. He saw my curiosity, my patience, my willingness to explore depth — and he wanted to awaken that part of me. It was a gentle way of saying: I want you to think about yourself, your journey, and perhaps, somewhere in the periphery, me. Under a flickering light, the next time I saw him, he finally explained himself, but they all shouted, I am trying to control the story before it controls me, and I thought — fine, unforgettable it is.

I could have jumped on a table and made a scene, but instead, I did something worse: I kept confronting him. And in those shifts — in the tightening of his jaw, the flash in his eyes — I was given exactly what I needed: more honesty. The illusion thinned, and I saw him not as I wanted him to be. Those fleeting expressions revealed more truth than any conversation ever could. I watched as he walked away, the anger still sharp in his profile, flashing briefly in the side glare of his eyes. It was there, but held in check, disciplined rather than explosive. He did not lash out or look back. He carried it with him, contained, choosing restraint over reaction. That kind of control takes effort. It spoke of someone aware. He knew exactly what he was doing. He understood the tension, understood what could be said or done, and deliberately left it unspoken. That was the real him. He gave just enough to keep things steady, to maintain his position, to avoid discomfort on his own terms. The effort was not selfless; it was strategic. He knew how to invest emotionally when it benefited him, and how to withdraw when it did not. And I was left disappointed, not because I expected perfection, but because I recognized the pattern. What I felt was not confusion, it was the letdown of realizing the connection had limits he had already decided on. Friendship was never on the table because I was not being seen. I was being collected.

Infatuation had blurred him at first, cast him in flattering light. But the shifts — those involuntary moments — cut through the haze. They showed me the difference between fascination and knowing, between desire and reality. And in seeing him clearly at last, I felt the cord loosen, its pull finally weakening, replaced by something steadier: understanding. If I had kissed him, I would have witnessed his final shift — the one no charm could hide. The shift that makes someone drift, where control slips and vulnerability seeps in. That moment when the sword presses against his chest, when the weight of being seen becomes undeniable. The line they are about to cross that renders them raw, exposed, human. Not weakness, but confrontation with the self they hide from the world — the secrets they bury, the shame they carry, the parts of themselves they keep locked away because admitting them might mean realizing they do not like who they are or what they did. A kiss, brief as it may be, could have forced him into that truth. It could have pulled back the curtain, stripped away the armor, and made him real in a way no words, no gestures, no book-gift ever could. Perhaps that was why it never happened — for the preservation of what could not survive the collision of desire.

His hands were soft — softer than I expected — and in the end, that is the only detail that survived, aside from the response I wanted to give him when he said, this could all be a dream. I wondered if he would have woken up if I had slapped him. He was a dreamer. The kind whose thoughts drifted like smoke, curling through the corners of the ordinary, turning the mundane into something that shimmered just out of reach. What stayed with me more than the cleverness of the reply was the arrogance behind his statement. The assumption that I could be convinced out of my own experience, that my senses were malleable, that reality itself could be rewritten if he spoke confidently enough. Most men like this rely on the hope that women will doubt themselves before they ever doubt him — that we will soften, simply apologize for being certain.

They mistake our silence for confusion, our restraint for ignorance. They refuse to realize we often understand exactly what is happening — we are just choosing when, and how, to respond. Their greatest weakness is believing they are the smartest voice in the room, that their version of events is automatically the truth. And sometimes the most dangerous thing to them is not a blade or a threat, but a woman who knows precisely what is real and refuses to be talked out of it.

I strongly believe it was his smile I got lost in — when denial followed harm. It was the kind of smile that suggested I was imagining things, that nothing was wrong. Kissing me would have been effortless compared to sharing a drink of cold water. One gesture demanded nothing; the other forced him to see me as human.

I look back on that version of myself with both tenderness and understanding. I see the limits I had, the ways my heart wandered and demanded without understanding. And yet, those limitations were necessary — they shaped my capacity for the enduring love I now share with Gavin. A love that persists through imperfections, through compromises and mistakes, through laughter and solidarity, because truly, the heart is deceitful above all things. Its quickness, its longing, its illusions — that is infatuation. The heart caught in desire, mistaking spark for flame, fling for commitment, hunger for intimacy. And in that recognition, there is both grief and grace: grief for what we were not capable of at the time, and grace for what we can now endure, what we can build, what we can now give.

Infatuation is this:

Petals on an empty floor — soft, delicate, abandoned. They tell a story the air refuses to carry, something that once bloomed in fullness, now scattered and quiet. Each one is a color against the gray, a memory pressed against emptiness. They crumble underfoot, yet even in letting go, they insist on beauty. I bend down to touch them, and they slip through my fingers like moments I am unable to reclaim. The scent is faint, almost imagined, and I am reminded of the impermanence of everything I hold dear. Petals on an empty floor do not beg for attention; they merely exist, asking only that we notice the fragility of life and the spaces between. Infatuation is not love. Infatuation is a fire that blinds the eyes and quickens the pulse. The heart forgets to ask what is true, and cries only:

How must I hold this flame?

Yet God calls us to higher wisdom. He reminds us that the heart is His garden. Desire, unchecked, is like a wildfire — it spreads quickly, consumes what is tender, and leaves emptiness in its wake. But the steady hand that waits in silence, the voice that returns when all else is gone, the presence that witnesses without claiming, the love that endures, slow and unhurried, through seasons of sun and darkness alike, that is love.