It wasn't the ocean or a view of the Golden Gate. It wasn't a beautiful sunset or a night blanketed in stars. But sitting at the intersection, watching the headlights come around the corner like the luminous beacon thrown out to sea from a lighthouse, I experienced that sensation one only gets pushed up against something so beautiful and so beyond their control that all they can do is submit to it, absorb it, make it a part of the landscape of their imagination.

She was radiant beside me as I spilled sugar over her in words that flowed from this river in me, a strong stream that finds its source in a thousand tiny moments with her, ripples and swells over the banks of our geography and makes its way to the ocean, to that lighthouse on the rocks.

And suspended in that moment--her head on my shoulder, smiling shyly, lips pressed into mine--I was on the horizon of every painted sky I've ever seen, drinking lemonade on a hot, summer afternoon, skinny dipping under a full moon, spinning 'till I'm too dizzy to stand. And my words trickled out, tiny and tremulous in proportion to the feelings which inspired them.

Adrift in emotion, with her in my veins like the buzz of fine wine, I photographed the Italian restaurant across the street, the couples pouring out of the restaurant across the way, taxis carrying them home, vagrant strangers passing by, lighted windows in dark stores imprinting them into my memory and knowing that the light cast on the street corner that night belonged to her and to us and that it would be mine always.

August 27, 2001