Letter to a first love, long lost

In the cool exhalation of winter, when the first sighs of spring soften the evening, it is still you, walking with me in the slanted sunlight. My body remembers the season and the blossoms recall you with their perfume. At each inhalation, you approach, until I can feel your warmth. Present. Never having left.

Years ago, when you first sat next to me, everything shifted. This was no adolescent fixation. Here was the beautiful destruction of false idols. Or so it seemed.   

Yet, before autumn’s end, days short of your eighteenth birthday, you were gone; breaking up with me over the phone. Winter’s sting was white hot that year. 

Then, of course, the ordinary business of moving on, starting over with others. Throughout our twenties, we stayed loosely in touch. You even attended my wedding. My wife liked you. Until, one Friday afternoon, at the markets in town, outside the continental deli, you in full bloom, heavily pregnant. I recall your lovely hands, ringed fingers cupped under your belly.

Thereafter…decades. Your baby will be 29 already.

I admit trying to find you online. Not to pry, nor reignite. Simply to know. What happened to the girl I fell so completely for? Who is the woman she grew into?  

If time has carved its lines in me, I wonder what sketches it has drawn of you.

These things, I realise, are trifles. Knowing won’t change a thing. For the season was briefly ours, and then it was not. Now we have the long, gentle quiet.

In truth, I rarely remember. Not like tonight. This only happens in the sweet, fluid shifting of thaw to flower, which mirrors the miracle of your arrival. You, who appeared like revelation. Me, who could scarcely believe.

This evening, as I do every year at this time, I moved beside you – and in my bones I felt again like the sapling who took root in your ground. For a few minutes, in visceral imagining, years fell away and I was in the instant you came to me.      

It was exquisite. Narcotic. Ecstatic crucifixion. I could so easily leave everything in these moments.    

Please understand, I do not want you back. Neither do I pine. We would not have been a good match. Most likely, you would have felt frustrated and forestalled, and I would have felt constrained. The inevitable compromise would surely have suited no one.

Therefore, it is not the past I write for. Rather, today. Because this present feeling, however it may be described, is just as beautiful. Maybe more so. I would that you could know this. Have this gift. And walk, as I will doubtless do one evening soon, in the gold coloured brightness of boundless belief. Fragile, fated to fade, yet in snatches plucked from the routine churn of years, transcendent. Like holding the whole in a single breath.

My love, ever new,

PR