The Handbook of Being Stupid In Love

There is a time when you're in love.
And there is a time when it's worse than that.
That is when you're stupid in love.
This is what it's like:

You sit in Mrs. Lucas's Literature Class
Junior year of high school
you are supposed to be discussing
"To the Lighthouse," By Viriginia Wolf
but instead you spend an hour
staring
at her knee.

The knee
of your best friend Alexis,
poking out from under her shorts
And all you can think of
through the entire class
is how nice it would be
to place the cool flesh of that knee
upon your face
your cheeks, your nose,
your forehead.

That's how stupid in love I was
with Alexis
my best friend
with whom with I hardly spoke a word.

Alexis was terminally shy
a writer at heart,
filling notebooks with poem
after poem
with the zeal of a sensitive teenage girl

So shy,
was Alexis,
that we couldn't actually talk.
And instead, we wrote letters.

Two, three, four, five times a day
Passed in class
and hallways.
There would be times,
we'd eat lunch together,
and each sit and write letters
to the person sitting across from us.

And that's how it went.
And that's how I fell in love with her.

She'd write to me
and tell me about her boyfriend
(of course she had a boyfriend
she always had a boyfriend)
she'd tell me about this boyfriend
and I,
in the subtle guise of a caring
and compassionate friend,
would try to convince her
that he was an asshole.
(Of course he was an asshole,
they were always assholes
he had to be an asshole
beacuse he wasn't me)

And I'm not sure exactly what I was thinking
wanting to kiss this girl
I still couldn't even talk to

But I was stupid in love

Stupid in love
is when you scrutinize her body
where her black hair
met her brown roots,
you study the back of her neck,
her round eyes,
her nose...her nose!
Could anything be more perfect?
Really?
Could we sculpt this nose
in bronze,
no, no,
in gold?
Can we put this nose in the smithsonian?
No, no,
can we create a new museum,
the Museum of Perfect Nose Beauty
of which her nose would be the only exhibit?
Doesn't anybody appreciate this like I do?

This is how your thoughts go,
stupid in love.

At one point,
Alexis wrote in a letter,
"I'm glad we're such good friends,
because if we hadn't become friends,
I probably would have done something dumb
like fall in love with you."

When you're stupid in love,
like I was,
you take this as a good sign.
Because there's a possibility.

When you're stupid in love,
like I was,
you call her on the phone,
even though neither of you really talk
and you cradle that phone to your ear
to hear the silence
her silence,
for hours and hours and hours.

When you're stupid in love
you write about her
you sing about her in the shower
you celebrate the time when she touched your shoulder
you build monuments to her smile
you inhale her first name
you exhale her last name
And she is
everything.

Until
the time
when you're stupid in love
and she's writing another poem
(Of course writing a poem
she's always writing a poem)
and she asks you to read the poem
(which,,
like anything she's touched,
is pure genius)
and you read the poem
and you're trying like hell to find something bad with it
because she's asked you to be "brutally honest"
but you can't because
as we've established,
you're stupid in love

And you make the mistake
of asking her
if she's ever written a poem
about you.

And she will look up at you
with those eyes you've memorized
and she will tell you,
no.

And that is how
you stop
being stupid in love.