Specifically the Dream of a Soulmate Infatuations

The infatuation crystallizes around a range of elements: a flip-flop handing nonchalantly off a foot: a paperback of Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha lying on a towel next to the suncream; well-defined eyebrows; a distracted manner when answering her parents: and a ways of resting her cheek in her palm while taking small moutfuls of chocolate mousse at the everning buffet.

Instinctively, he teases out an entire personlity from the details. looking up at the revolving wooden baldes of the ceiling fan in his room, in his mind Rabih write the story of his life with her.She will be melancholy and street-smart. She will confide in him and laugh at the hypocrisy of others. girls at school, symptoms of a sensitive and profound personality.

She'll have been lonely, and will never until now have taken anyone into her full confidence. they'll sit on her bed playfull enlacing their fingers. She, too, won't ever have imagined that such a bond could be possible between two people

Then, one morning, without warning, she is gone and a Dutch couple with two small boys are sitting at her table. She and her parents left the hotel at dawn to catch the Air France flight home, the manager explains.

The whole incident is negligibe. The are never to meet again. He tell no one. She is wholly untouched by his ruminations. Yet if the story begins here, it is because - though so much about Rabih will alter and mature over the years - his understanding of love will for decades retain precisely the structure it first assumed at the Hotel Case Al sur in the summer of his sixteeth year. He will continue to trust in the possibility two human beings and in the chance of a definitive end to loneliness.

He will experience similarly bittersweet longing for other lost soulmates spotted on buses, in the aisles of supermarkets and in the reading rooms of libraries.He will have precisely the same feeling at the age o twenty, during a semester of study in Manhat-tan, about a women seated to his left on the northland C train, and at twenty-five in the architectural office in Berlin where he is doing work experience,and at twenty-nine on a flight between Paris and London after a brief conversation over the English Chan-nel with a women named chloe: the feeling of having happened upon a long-lost missing part of his own self.

For the Romantic, it is only the briefest of steps from a glimpse of a stranger to the formulation of majestic and substained conclusions that her or she may constiute a comprehensive answer to the unspoken question of existence.

Then intensity may seem tivial, humorous even, yet this reverence for instinct is not a minor planet within the cosmology of relationship. It is the underlying central sun around which contemporary ideals of love revole.

Read Part 3