Love in Lowercase Read Online Free PDF Page A

green, I crossed the street, thinking about the fastest way to get home. I was right in the middle when the light changed to amber. It was then that I saw her.
    The woman was more or less my age, tall and slim, with long, wavy black hair. Her slightly almond-shaped eyes and the freckles scattered on her cheeks confirmed that it was her. I’d caught only a quick glimpse of her when we were facing each other. From her bemused look, I knew she’d recognized me too.
    Time suddenly seemed to stop, like a satori in the old man’s book. Then the past shot forward with astounding clarity.
    â€”
    I was transported to a Saturday afternoon thirty years ago that I thought I had forgotten. I’d gone with my sister to a mansion on La Rambla, just as we did every weekend. It had a sweeping marble staircase and lots of places to hide. We went there because one of her school friends lived next door. The kids in the neighborhood regularly met there to play whatever games they came up with. That day it was the old classic, hide-and-seek.
    I went to hide under some stairs, but someone had beaten meto it, a little girl aged six, like me, with curly black hair and glowing eyes.
    â€œDo you know what a butterfly kiss is?” she whispered.
    â€œNo.” I was scared. “What’s that?”
    She opened and shut her eyes a couple of times, her eyelashes brushing my cheek.
    I never completely forgot that little girl, even though I never saw her again. Until now. Yes, it was her, no doubt about that, and she’d just crossed the street after pausing for an instant when we met midway.
    Strange as it may seem, I had the feeling that, in essence, she hadn’t changed.
    In that fraction of a second I knew I’d always loved Gabriela. I still remembered her name. I realized in a flash that she was the love of my life, that I could never love anyone else as I’d loved that little girl who gave me a butterfly kiss under the stairs. There was no explanation. I simply knew it.
    The satori was broken as the light turned red and we hurried across the street in opposite directions. When I got to the other side, I turned around and saw she’d done the same, giving me a faint smile before continuing on her way.
    I wished I could stop her, have coffee with her, and ask about her life, but traffic had taken over the street again, wiping out all traces of a path back to the past.
    â€”
    I must have raised my arm, because a taxi driver, thinking I had signaled to him, stopped just in front of me. I mechanically got in and mumbled my address. Slumped in the backseat, I could feel my heart pounding in a strange way and a tight sensation in my stomach that I had not experienced since adolescence.
    As we weaved our way through the traffic, I had a moment of lucidity. The revelation had come to me only seconds after the reappearance—and loss—of Gabriela.
    It was so obvious that anyone else might think that carrying on about it was pointless. But I welcomed it as a revelation. Somehow it dawned on me that Gabriela, my childhood love, had come back to me because I’d filled a saucer with milk. There was no apparent link between the two things, but they were connected at a deeper level.
    After I had poured milk into his saucer, the cat had hidden away in my apartment. Then he had led me to the old man, the old man to the model-train shop—and to Gabriela.
    The piece of train track in my pocket now acquired a transcendental meaning. That aluminum curve had led me off my path into the arms of a ghost from my past.
    Now I knew that our future depends on such tiny acts as feeding a cat or buying a section of model-train track.
    But what did all this mean? Did I have to search for Gabriela? Should I go back and pick up my life where I’d left it thirty years earlier? Where did the links of this chain lead?
    Love in lowercase, that’s the secret
. I felt as if the words didn’t come from me but from a