Hot Chocolate

First things: Hot Chocolate is not a reference in any way to Alicia Keys. That is completely beneath me.

Second things, of more importance than the first: Alicia Keys believes in love in a way that I would like to, a way that we all should.

Memory: There was this girl in college that I was struck by as she was entering the cafeteria. Not in the physical sense, but in the sense that remembering that day feels like a hand fisting and unfisting itself in my solar plexus. The girl was a roommate of one of my best friend's good friends and had recently become an acquaintance of mine. Her hair was soaking wet as if she had just come from a shower or a swim or a rain storm that was following her and responsible for the heat in the air that causes electricity without rain. I remember it very clearly. She was wearing jeans and a black t-shirt that had relfective silver screening so that you could see yourmoving handsin it if you were talking to her.

She walked into the cafeteria and dissapeared when the door closed and, as far as I am concerned, that's when the sun did set and the day ended.

After some weeks of getting to know her and growing closer together, I mustered the nerve to ask her out and was surprised by her answer. It felt like a hand was clenching and releasing itself in my chest.

I planned a night at an ice rink, with a local production of The Nutcracker to follow on the rink. In preparation for the night I was continually bombarded with this striking image of her with her hair wet and in a black t-shirt entering a door and dissapearing. That night, however, she was wearing a white sweater that went high up to her neck and we huddled close beneath a blanket she had quilted as the locals skinned their knees with falls. During the intermission she spilled a Hot Chocolate on her white sweater. We went back to school when it was over.

This was around the time that the video for You Don't Know My Name was coming out and the memory of this song and the spilled Hot Chocolate have become seamlessly mated. It seems that You Don't Know My Name is made of these details. Alicia cooing about the man who always orders the special with the hot chocolate, walking in a park across the street from where you work. That these are the things tied to love. That these are things worth believing in and remembering.