Love Tastes Like Mangos
By: Kp Hartman
Tags: Presence, Relationships, Fiction, Self, Love

A Love Story

Photo by Phoenix Han on Unsplash

Love was a woman of a few but pointed words. Her point would drip down from wine-colored lips to hang in the air before you until she was certain you understood. She held you something tender and something fierce. She could sweep you up at any moment and make you forget about all else. Love is fickle that way. She makes you decide if you’re all in because if you’re not, she’s not interested.

Somewhere in our beginning, Love and I took a walkout on the Boulevard. She was speaking although I can’t for the life of me remember what she was saying. Her voice seemed to come from far away. I don’t remember the way the sky looked or the ocean or what part of the Boulevard we were on. My mind was off in an elsewhere place, concerned about literally anything else except what was happening around me at that moment.

“Where are you?” Love asked, her voice and a tug on my arm pulling me from the wanderings of my mind.

“I’m right here,” I said, looking at her for the first time since we started walking.

“Then be here with me,” she said.

She knew presence, properly. For her, presence was a state of being not a commodity to be obtained. And she never took it for granted. Presence was something you either were or were not. If you were not, she’d pull you right back because it was the only place she knew how to be. She swore that being present was the only way to properly experience life and couldn’t understand why anyone would bother being anywhere else. No matter what. Pain and sorrow. Anger and heartbreak. Love and joy. Happiness and Ecstacy.

In the few short months, we had together; she taught me presence, in little ways, in little questions and tugs on my arm.

Another night in the same summer, Love and I sat out on the porch of that old house overlooking the bay; the sun setting like God had taken a rainbow and stretched it across the horizon. My hand rested gently inside the hand of the woman sitting next to me, her back pressed against my chest, and the sun casting a ballet of shadows over her face. There was nothing to do at this moment. Nothing other than enjoying the company of the other, the setting sun, and the warmish summer night.

I can remember that evening on the patio in vivid detail. I can tell you exactly how the wind felt raising gooseflesh on our arms; how her hand felt warm and soft and delicate in mine; how the sunset looked stretched across the horizon like maybe angels were making a choir there; how the ocean danced to the tune of the angel’s call. I can tell you how the sun made shadows dance on my lover's face. They played a ballet against her full lips and the dip between her cheekbone and jawline. Her hair was tied up on her head in the haphazard state of always about to fall out and she wore overalls that belonged to the eighties. But the best part was the way she laughed behind a bite of mango, the juice painting her lips and dripping from the corner of her mouth.

Love tasted like a mango that night. Sticky and sweet and refreshing.

But what I can’t tell you is what she was talking about on the Boulevard that day or if she was wearing overalls or if her hair was spilling down around her shoulders. I can’t tell you if the ocean was calm or dancing with white caps. I can’t tell you how it sounded the first time she told me she loved me. Because I missed it. Because despite her hand being held in mine, I wasn’t actually there for it.

And it all came down to presence. It all came down to that old adage of ‘be here now.’ Another way of saying ‘be grounded.’ Another way of saying ‘say what you mean and mean what you say.’ Another way of saying ‘live as if the only thing that exists is right now because it is and look… it’s already gone.’ Another way of asking you if you are willing to miss the things you miss when you are not present.

‘Where are you?’ she had asked from our seat on the old porch swing.

She cast her steady gaze and piercing green eyes up at me. She looked the part of an angel with her full lips the color of red wine set against her dark skin and a halo of soft hair framing the delicate curves of her face. I must have looked the part of the fool, holding a beauty such as that.

‘I’m right here,’ I said.

‘Hmm, finally.’