I guess you could say I carried a torch for him, well at times it was just a tiny flicker of light cupped in my hand to keep the flame alive in the gale that was my life. Other times the fire burned so brightly I had to turn my eyes away and wipe the tears. We count almost 50 years as we look back over the decades of our relationship. For most of the time we were on other trains headed to other places, but on occasion we had a minute to sit in the waiting room and catch up before the conductor called all aboard, a summons for one of us to go. We left reluctantly, always looking back and wondering, what if I asked him/her for tomorrow? We now discover that our mind reading skills were abysmal and our best interest would have been better served by being forthright rather than honorable.
When I think about yesterday I always see first his hand reaching for me, pulling me to him. Then I remember his mouth and the words he said, the ones that bound me to him forever. “I have always loved you and I always will. You don’t realize how special you are. You could do or be anything you desire.” I was too young and hell bent on self destruction to listen to my heart and his. I let him walk away, back to his wife and family feeling like I was in a god damn country song.
We almost waited too long, but in a series of events that makes me believe in miracles, here we are sitting at our table, in our apartment, breathing in each other’s contentment. Aside from the passion we feel is the serenity of perfectly matched biorhythms, homologues childhoods, parallel journeys of discovery and the continuous unveiling of shared values we both arrived at independently. Here we are finally free from the lies of our lives, with no regret for all the bullets we took to protect those dear to us, only the ones we would have stepped in front of had we seen them in time. There will always be a bittersweet edge to our days because of the things we cannot change, but they are balanced by a new definition of love, the one that we discovered in each other.
Do you recall that psychological experiment in trust that where one person was required to fall backward and let the other catch them? It was a popular sit com comedy foil where Charlie Brown like characters would try again and again to believe that this time things would be different, but they always found themselves on the ground feeling hurt and foolish while we laughed at the running gag. Take it from someone who has been down there more than a few times, it’s not as amusing from a horizontal vantage point. Each time I picked myself back up and blamed my own stupidity, but what is most surprising is I never learned enough skepticism to keep me from trying one more time. When he came to me this time I believed just as sincerely as I did when I was 17 and I let myself fall.
Most of the stuff that we broke on our way to each other will heal and some will end up stronger than before. Those things that cannot be mended were always beyond our control anyway.
The sunset never looked so beautiful.
