The 6 Best Romantic Gestures
These are the 6 best romantic gestures, in descending order:
6. Making direct eye contact with your partner, ask them how their day has been so far. Avoid becoming distracted by external stimuli, or lost in thought. When they are finished telling you, ask how tomorrow will be. Your tomorrow is carved into the side of your childhood home, under the deck, where your dad kept his Weber grill. Let them know this. Repeat it as many times as you need to, and ask them to do the same.
5. In total silence, place your hands on your partner’s chest, over their heart. Count the beating in your head. On the 5th heartbeat, explore with grace and curiosity the way panic manifests itself in your body. Is it a knot in your gut? A tightness in your chest? On the 10th heartbeat, allow the panic to give way to fear. This is no place you’ve ever known yourself. 15th heartbeat: Your body collapses in complete exhaustion. 20th heartbeat: You grow wings and ascend to the ceiling. 25th heartbeat: Return to where panic exists in your body, but this time you’re ready. On the 30th heartbeat you’ll be someone else entirely, even if you don’t realize it yet.
4. Huddled under the sheets together, your sexual appetites merge and flex and settle like dead skin cells all over the furniture. It’s time to ask one another, just above a whisper: How much of what you say do you really mean? What percentage of your insides match your outsides, at any given time? Is your kindness just a facade — do you use your “niceness” as a way to manipulate people? Are you a good person or are you impersonating what you imagine to be a good person so you can get what you want from others? How many times a week do you tell a lie or embellish the truth to make yourself look better? 3? 10? 100? Does it bother you to think that you may be nothing more than a fraud in a warm, sticky body you don’t deserve? Even a little bit?
3. Over dinner, when the conversation has turned to a topic you resent, excuse yourself to the restroom. Studying your face in the mirror, spend several seconds smiling, and then frowning. Smiling, and then frowning. Over and over. How does that feel? What does it remind you of? Have you ever considered that when you look at a bare tree in winter, perfectly reflected in a body of water, you’re in a way seeing the entire tree, as its root structure somewhat mirrors its branches? Return to dinner elated and vast with energy, potential, and true love and appreciation for your place in the universe. Before taking your seat, kiss your partner fully on the lips. Remember that time is tugging at every corner of your awareness, threatening to rip it asunder when you least expect or want it to. Suggest catching a movie, or perhaps a after dinner cocktail. Leave your reflection trapped in the mirror back in the bathroom. Ignore its howling.
2. Lying on the hood of your car together, extend your legs into the sky, covering entire star systems and constellations with your feet. Contemplate in in as much sincerity and earnestness as you can muster what it means to be selfless and compassionate. Allow a single star to escape the surface area of your foot by moving it slightly to the left. 80 million years ago a planet much like ours orbited this star. On this planet existed a civilization of beings, much like us, and they wrote poetry, and cooked meals, and waged war, and built malls for teenagers to hang out in, until one day they realized they were fully satisfied with everything they’d accomplished and created together. A gentle, unseen solar wind still carries their dust to us. Understanding this, extend your palm and expel all doubt, hatred, and delusion from your small and insignificant body.
1. Holding hands in a narrow hallway intermittently illuminated with flickering fluorescent lights, your discussion can veer in any number of directions. Politics, the weather, celebrity gossip, a novel you both read and disliked. It doesn’t matter. The point is you are not alone, and the souls shuffling past you up and down the hall are not alone either. Every time you blink you are reborn as a new ghost inside your own skin, bright and endless and mostly imperceptible. And you will all be leaving together.
