I'm going to Chicago in two weeks.

I'm going to get on a United flight from SFO to O'Hare and when I climb off the plane with my sister at my side, I'll be in the city I almost called home. I'll be looking out at a landscape so familiar, taking a flight that I took so many times that year I found love in a far off place. But this time, I won't get the blue line to Logan Square and let myself in to her apartment, wait with the puppy for her to come home. This time, she won't be sitting just out of sight at the gate almost shyly, she won't grab my attention with a throaty "Deeeetz" in which I catch hints of a Southern drawl.

I felt a surge of something when my dad first called and began the planning, when my dad asked if we should have dinner at the restaurant and told me he'd hung out with KC a couple of nights before. But it wasn't the same something that haunted me before, the same something that produced page after page of my yearning for her or for answers and for some sort of closure.

Walking back to my office yesterday, a chicken kebob sandwich in hand, the feeling that came over me was gratitude. It caught me off guard for a second, and startled to find it there, I thought about the last year and about everything I've been through and about how painful and confusing and heartwrenching it was to lose that relationship and everything it represented for me and how I finally got to a place where I felt free to let her go, to move on, to love her and also to know that I would never be with her, that she could never come back to what we had. How proud I was that I let myself heal through that in a way that felt really healthy and that wasn't mean-spirited or spiteful, in a way that didn't leave me feeling jaded or pessimistic, but allowed me to see this life I really wanted for myself with another person, even though it would not come to fruition with the person I'd painted into the pictures.

And then, tucking my gratitude into my pocket and smiling from a very deep place, I thought about my girl. And how happy I am with her, how beautiful and real my relationship is with her. And she's here and she welcomes my family and my friends into our life together and she brings me into hers and we argue about stupid shit and we frustrate each other and I hook my leg around her when I go to bed at night and she draws me pictures of Mexico and puts her hand on my thigh when we're driving and thanks me for making the bed.

I thought about my girl and the life we have together, the potential for the life we may have together down the line. And the feeling that was there, when I thought about Chicago and KC and the journey I've taken over many months and through many emotions, was gratitude wrapped up in love, wrapped up in a stronger sense of myself and all the things I want for my life.

I thought about my girl and how I wouldn't trade her for anything.

October 24, 2001