I think, perhaps, it's hit a personal nerve that I've never experienced something so mutually reciprocated and tender, with both people clearly adoring and caring about each other, yet both women seriously denying what they are emotionally and romantically experiencing.
The other thing is this is the kind of title I'd give anyone who says two people of the same gender can't possibly fall in love. Ironically, the people I'd want to give it to would probably never read it...but it shows, rather than tells, exactly how beautiful feelings can be. It's so good it makes 90% of the other lesfic I've read (even some of the better stuff) seem like absolute trash.
There are so many wonderful passages, such as this one:
I think you playfully hit my backpack then, and when I turned around to grin at you, I caught something in your gaze that I didn’t understand—and know now you didn’t either. That early, I saw love in your eyes.
The Iowa woods are enchanting. My grandmother, a lover of nature and especially of the woods, had taught me to love the names of the oaks—bur, red, northern pin. I love their thick grooved trunks and their broad prayers of branches. I recognized lindens and hawthorn, buckeye and hickory. Near the ground, witch hazel. The path, dirt now, wove gently beneath the green, arched cathedral ceiling of those great trees, and somewhere nearby a house wren sang.
“What do you see?” you asked. I wanted to be poetic. In class, you read poetry like others read aloud religious texts, and I wanted you to understand how beautiful I found those woods, how connected and grounded they made me feel.
“Tara?”
Why did it surprise me to hear you use my name? It was as if I thought you didn’t know it...some quality to your voice just then, some softness, some tenderness, startled me into silence. The house wren, too.
There's a purity to The Beginning Of Us that you don't see in too many love stories these days (gay or straight) and I think that's what resonates with me the most...
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