Pinotage: A Thursday Inspiration

Written for Thursday Inspiration #327 –
“Love Is Like Oxygen”. Here’s my response.

For this week’s Thursday Inspiration, Jim Adams asks us to respond to the challenge in any number of ways. I have chosen to feature a story and song that conveys the message of love being vital for survival.

Pinotage

For twenty-three years, Jenna had kept a small, worn notebook. Not a diary …. more like a map. She’d scribbled in it every time she felt the specific absence she couldn’t name: on the night her last relationship ended in a parking lot in the rain; the Sunday morning she sat across an empty kitchen table and heard nothing but the refrigerator hum; the New Year’s Eve she smiled so hard her face ached, surrounded by people hollow as a bell.

She called it the notebook of almost.

Sam kept no notebook. He simply moved from city to city, project to project, the way a man does when he’s trying to outrun something that’s constantly keeping pace with him. He was good at beginnings, the electric first weeks of anything. But somewhere in every middle, he’d feel it …. a faint dimming, as if the lights in a room had been turned down a degree. No one else ever noticed; he always did.

They met in an unremarkable way …. a friend’s housewarming, a kitchen too crowded with people who all seemed to already belong somewhere. He was refilling his glass. She was pretending to read the label on a wine bottle.

“Pinotage. It’s South African,” he said, without turning. “The wine you keep picking up.”

She looked at the bottle in her hand. “I knew that.”

“Sure.”

She laughed …. not the polished laugh she used at parties, but the small, surprised one, the one that escaped before she could shape it into something presentable. He turned to her.

That was the whole moment. That was all it took.

Three months later, they were sitting on her fire escape waiting for the sun to rise, the city below them going about its sleepy, pre-dawn way. She’d brought out the notebook. She wasn’t sure why …. she’d never shown it to anyone. He read it slowly, turning each page with a carefulness that made her chest ache.

When he finished, he didn’t say I had no idea or you should have told someone or anything that would have made her feel like a patient. He said, “I think I’ve been writing the same book …. but with my feet. You know?”

She understood completely.

“I was so tired,” she said quietly. “Not sleep-tired. The other kind.”

“I know.” He closed the notebook and handed it back. “Me too. For years.”

She looked at him …. really looked, the way you look at something when you stop being afraid of what you might see. “What changed?”

He didn’t hesitate. “You.”

The word landed simply, without performance. She felt it move through her like a warm bath …. gradual, then all at once.

“I would die for you,” she said. And even as she said it, she understood she didn’t just mean sacrifice.

He reached over and covered her hand with his. Below them, a cab honked. Somewhere, a window lit up.

“I would live for you,” he said. “Every single day.”

She leaned her head in close to his. The notebook sat beside her. The map had gotten her here; she already knew she wouldn’t be writing in it anymore.

She was home.

Some people search their whole lives for the thing that makes survival feel worthwhile. The lucky ones find it …. not in a grand moment but in a kitchen, a brief exchange, a laugh that slips out before it can be stopped.

♡ ♡ ♡ ♡ ♡

This is “Love Will Keep Us Alive” by The Eagles

Thursday Inspiration #327 Love Is Like Oxygen

Many thanks to Jim Adams for this week’s inspiration. Thanks to you all for stopping by for a look and a listen.

That’s all she wrote, kids.

See you on the flip side. 😎

NAR©2026

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