In the rearview mirror, my affair, a one-week cataclysm that cracked open the winter of 2010, seems ludicrous and resistant to comprehension: It's banal in its particulars, yet it was for me both shatteringly ecstatic and distressing. When I kissed Paul, it was the end of my first, frenzied semester as a doctoral student. I had only been married to my husband, Nick, since August. My panicked heart burned and sputtered.
I fell in love with Paul slowly, but easily. We met in a graduate seminar on nineteenth-century literature: I admired his artful, quick-witted mind and his velvety warm blue eyes. After collaborating on a class presentation, I was enthralled, but in a way that seemed chaste, even sisterly. I had never found it difficult to maintain platonic male friendships while romantically committed, so I assumed the band on my finger wouldn't bar friendship now.
But once I acknowledge my attraction to a person, I am almost irrevocably distracted, my awareness totally reoriented by piqued desire and curiosity. Such was the case when, one fall evening, Paul and I grabbed a beer at a restaurant near campus. I had reassured myself that this outing was innocent—why not make friends with my new classmates? But as the night drew on and the beer eased my edges, Paul's own form, though shadowed by the dim light, seemed to solidify before me, peripheries defined, precious matter within a nothing of space. I could hold him, and I wanted to.
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