I walked by two girls kissing on the sidewalk. They were maybe fifteen or sixteen, just let out from school and still wearing their backpacks. I felt shy or embarrassed at first, because they were so deeply engrossed in kissing and here I was, not three feet away. They had their arms around each other's necks and they pressed their mouths together, not with the false perfection of kisses in movie scenes, but with urgency and fullness, as if they meant to melt into each other through the lips. It was somehow innocent and earnest. They didn't care who else was on the street, they didn't even notice I was there, as if some force field around them had obliterated the public and the private, their puritanical rules, and remade space into some third transcendent category.

So I walked by unnoticed, averting my eyes only as a gesture of politeness. I thought of love and of being young, and I felt an overwhelming affection for the things around me--the reverent quiet of a city park, the bare armed trees overhanging the cast iron fences, the false spring weather in February--this little corner of the world where, for a moment, there was peace.