She fell in love with the sad looking boy in the picture, not knowing that she had already been in love with him many years before. The picture was in a book about the American civil war she had seen in a bookstore, and while she didn’t know which side he was on, as her knowledge of America was lacking, she instantly recognized him as someone she could easily fall in love with.
He sat on the side of a row of men eating. He was looking up, holding a bit of his sandwich in his right hand and staring back at the camera with not caring eyes. There were a number of things that attracted her to him, first of which was her habit of picking out attractive men from pictures. But also there was something familiar about him. She felt that she knew something personal about him and thus personal about the war.
In fact, she had first fallen in love with him in 672, while flying over Vienna. It was springtime then, and they, being two robins, did what birds do in the springtime. Though romance between birds is a fleeting thing, she took a strong liking to him, the way female birds take a liking to the men who perform for them. The way he perched on things, his beautiful feathers, when him and few other robins chased off a crow. She developed a true fondness for him in a very bird like way. They met during other spring times, had many little robins who’s descendants now populate the earth, and though they were in no way together, since birds never thought of marriage, they still developed a true and lasting fondness.
If this was a story written by a romantic they would have met in every lifetime after that, but in reality whenever they spent the same time living in the world they were hardly ever the same species. Sure when he was a hare he wasn’t sure why that mountain lion didn’t eat him, but I’m guessing that was a coincidence, not her doing. They did share species on a few occasions and on three more they made love, twice birthing children. She never met that poor soldier who died on the battlefield in 1863, the last time they had met was in 1712 as two bears.
Shortly prior to falling in love with the soldier, she had met a young man about her age. He always had a sad air to him, but she liked the way he moved and she liked the things he said, even if he didn’t smile much. They didn’t start dating at once, but she liked him enough that she was embarrassed to tell him about the girlish obsession she got about people long dead. They would wander around the city drinking and laughing, or they’d talk about serious things that they both knew were ridiculous, but he liked talking about them and she liked hearing him talk.
One evening they finally kissed. They almost ran through the city that night, pushing each other against walls and kissing every time they turned a corner. In a few weeks the relationship progressed to what each of them was slightly too afraid to call love. Days and nights spent together, touching each other whenever they could.
On a quiet night, while walking through the city, they stopped somewhere to get food. They had been drinking and laughing all night and didn’t think they had a care in the world. He sat on the curb of a sidewalk eating while she stood in front of him doing the same.
Looking down at him, she noticed something, just for a second. He looked up in the middle of a bite of his sandwich, and gazed back at her. She had the strangest look on her face.
She was about to tell him that she had never been this happy before, but, for a moment, she wasn’t quite so sure.
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