HURRICANES AND HEARTACHES

If there's anything more frightening than being in love, it's the realization that the object of your affection doesn't return your feelings. Hoping against hope and reason, I wish and hope and plead and pray for a chance to change this, and no matter how bleak and dismal it looks--no matter how infinitesmal my chances--I can't give up. I love her.

As a youth in central Florida, the possibility of a hurricane making landfall always excited me, and I kept my fingers crossed that the technicolor blob the meteorologist pointed to on the TV screen would veer off course and run aground over Tampa Bay. It wasn't destruction I looked forward to, but the excitement of the high winds, the stinging rain, the rising waters.

Today, I know I must treat my precarious situation like another long-forgotten, uneventful hurricane season on Florida's Gulf Coast. The chances of this silky-haired, hazel-eyed hurricane choosing my coastline remain unlikely, and although expecting a change of course will probably only lead to disappointment, I must prepare for a Category 5 storm even as the sky shows nary a strike of lightning.

Bring in the plants and patio furniture. Just in case.