Dear KC,

I saw her today.

I'm in love, too, you know. We have an apartment. And furniture. And she cooks me garlic-laced dinners while I unwind on the couch after a long day of meetings or teaching or life. She cooks me dinner and she gives me love and she's everything I never imagined I could find again. In fact, she's more.

You, of course, were there. Wrapped up inside me. I had sifted through my pain, my anger, my sorrow and discovered the powdery remnants of that life we promised each other, scattered across my heart like ashes thrown into their final resting place.

I found that I still loved you, in spite of everything, and that I could live with that. I could live with that at first because I had no choice and then, because love came knocking again.

And so yesterday, when I found myself peeking through the pages of this ether that allows me to look through the cracks in the door of your life, I expected the usual articles I've passed over a hundred times. I expected, perhaps, to hear of new ventures in career, in pursuit of your dreams. I did not, however, to expect to get a window into your life. With her.

I can say that these years later, the truth is that I felt deflated. Someone took their big, fat fist and thrust it into my stomach. I couldn't breathe. I felt stunned by the casual way about her "In my free time, I go fishing with Kelly and our dogs." Like she's said the words so many times that she can't even taste them on her tongue.

All of my neatly woven rationalizations about why you were no longer here with me simply scattered with the gust of wind that swept away my comfortable explanations for your departure. The easy excuses I'd made for why we were so suddenly you and me.

I got all the way to the end, past the picture of her face, the news of the restaurant she's opening. It didn't even occur to me she knew you. Let alone that she would make such a statement to the Chicago Tribune, a paper which only a spoonful of years earlier had been interviewing *you.* Such a public declaration for someone with ties to a very private you. A you who scrupulously covered your tattoos so the tennis club wouldn't see your other side.

For all these years since you left me, my sense of closure had been dangling precariously on a tiny limb of a big, strong tree. A tree with branches I could climb to reflect and with roots to ground me. A friend that became a comfort after the long stretches of grief your leaving inspired. I believed you just couldn't allow yourself to be intimate. I got too close. I hit a nerve in you that was simply too raw. You needed to leave me in a grand, dramatic way or you knew that you would never leave. You struggled so much through your pain that you could love someone in the only way we knew - loud, consuming, intense, personal, new.

But the bough has broken and yes, the cradle did fall. I find myself reeling again with a great sense of loss. Visions of the way things could have been haunt me - the phone call after you met her to tell me about the butterflies, the time you had your first fight, the way you think she doesn't understand those little things about you that I understood but how you love her all the same.

I always hoped no matter what we could be friends. But to hope is to live beyond the real and now.

I saw her today and remembered that there are things in life that we are simply not meant to understand.

October 7, 2003