"My love is..."

This morning I was on the bus going to work, and I was only about 3 stops from my destination. An older, shabbily dressed man got on the bus and took the seat directly in front of me. At first glance I thought he was homeless and (I'm a little ashamed to admit) I immediately braced myself to hold my breath. But he smelled just fine. He sat down and turning diagonally in his seat and opened up a large sketch pad. There were words beautifully scrawled all over every page.

I was immediately intrigued. Of course I had to take a peek.

He was just aimlessly leafing through his pages, and it was hard for me to read more than a word or two. Some pages appeared to be lists, others seemed to be essays, and still other looked like poems. On the first three pages, the title "My Love is..." was written at the top, and many, many sentences were written below it. I was dying to read that. Was he describing the love he has to give? Or was he describing the characteristics of a person he considered to be his love?

As he continued to flip through the pages I caught several titles: "Dreamer," "Nature Walk," "Maiden," and "Lamp Light." On one page I caught one lone sentence that struck me: "The happiest moments in my life were spent quietly against your breast."

At that moment I loved that man. Loved that he was bursting with things to express and needed to get them down on paper. Loved that he read back through it. Loved that (did I imagine this?) he was holding it in such a way that others could look at it, too.