Old Flames and the Idiocy of Misapprehending Failure

One of the great loves of my life inspired this lofty bit of reminiscence a few years back. In between then and now, I've occasionally reread it -- sometimes growing inordinately pleased with myself for its various turns of phrase; other times casually steeping the fibers of my soul in an idyllic marinade of nostalgia.

She read it, late last week.

I can't conceivably impress upon you the magnitude of that sentence. She read it.

More stupefying yet: the day after she read it, she was here.

We spoke. We touched. I beheld the lines of fourteen lost years upon her face, none of them able to reduce her beauty to so much as one iota short of Aphrodite's. We explored together our reasons and reasoning for the absurdly enormous mutual mistake -- the things she would not admit to herself at the time and the things I would not contemplate deeply enough to reconsider in the years since.

And all because, when I admitted in rather red-cheeked mortification that she'd been naggingly and increasingly on my mind of late, the man I love said, "If you're really that anxious to know what became of her, why don't you try getting in contact?"

It was so easy to do once I summoned the courage.

We fit so perfectly back together the moment she responded.

And now I have, again, in my life, something I should never have let go of.

She loved the post, even though she laughingly pointed out to me the parts she said were "horseshit." She loved that I had written it, that I had captured in such keenly scintillant prose at least a fraction of the monumental truth of us. She loved my favorite line most of all.

She loves me, still, never having stopped -- just as I now understand I have never stopped loving or needing her.

When we took her to the airport this afternoon, it was not to send her home, but to send her temporarily back the life in which she's contentedly waited out the last fourteen years. There are loose ends there to tie up. Somewhere around fourteen days from now, she'll return and stay.

But even with the width of half the country between us, we aren't apart, and won't ever be again.

Which is probably why I can't figure out how to end this post, I suppose; it's a post about something that's refused for fourteen years to be over. I can't possibly contain it in just a few paragraphs.

All right, I'm going to go and compose about a thousand emails to have waiting for her when her flight is done and she takes her phone out of airplane mode.