You were standing across from me on that walkway, dressed up in your nice clothes. You had inched back so that your heels extended past the edge of the concrete, which pushed you all snug like into the bush behind you. You looked ridiculous. I laughed and you told me your feet hurt (your nice shoes), which only made me laugh more. And that was it, the moment. It was adorable and I melted. I melted into you more than I already was (this in spite of all my denials and evasions and reasons why not), and I stayed there until the night we were finally together, and through it, and on into the day and night after, and all the way until now and probably still beyond it. And the moments where I was nervous or awkward or defensive was all just being scared. Of looking stupid, of not being experienced enough or pretty enough or blah blah blah/this that and the other/x y and z enough. Of wanting you so much and you not wanting me back.

Now I’m six thousand something miles away and you’re still right there. Heels in the dirt, hands in your pockets, smile on your face. And me, all melty before you.

I forgive you.

You’re not perfect and you didn’t do this perfectly. I was hurt and angry and disappointed. But I forgave you then, forgive you now, will keep forgiving even when I see you again, even when I remember you and us and it staggers me. I forgive you your faults and your weaknesses and the growing up you still have to do. I forgive that you changed your mind. Forgive that I wasn’t enough, wasn’t worth your love and your fight and your faith. Forgive you because what else can I do. I forgive you. I let you go. No happy ending, no big gesture, no taking it back. And I forgive that too. Breathe. Forgive. Breathe. Let go.

I fell in love with you toward the end of the shoot. I had a giddy, embarrassing, totally off limits crush on you for longer but I remember when it went different. I was up on the second floor where we were shooting and you were down below with the cart. I threw a grape at you and I think that’s when you put your hood up, dramatically. (I could be remembering that wrong but I know your hood was up. Did you have a camera that I was hiding from? The place is so clear but the details have gone fuzzy.) I stole glances down at you. You were labeling your cases with ‘sound department’ cutouts. You had an xacto knife and were concentrating. You looked small down there, childlike, labeling your things with care. Neatly. I loved you.

I missed you today in an anxious way. I wanted you to show up even though I knew you wouldn’t.

It’s back to the same routine at work. I get touched and joked with, and I go along and play my part. But I’d rather not. I’d rather be texting you. I’d rather you be here so I could smile at you, smile in a real way like I don’t with them. I’d rather bring you water and Nerds and touch you in front of people. I’d rather watch you and the furrow on your forehead that you get when you’re concentrating. I’d rather you be flirting with me. I’d rather your arms and your waist and your eyes looking so green and lashes so heavy in the shower. I’d rather my hand on your cheek and my finger in your mouth and that look on your face, the one I can’t describe. Not adoring or filled with lust. Not distant or broody. (You had those looks too.) Contemplative. Worried. Confused. Serious. Seeking. It was like you were looking at me and trying to answer a question for yourself. What was the question? What were you looking for? Did you find your answer or did you just stop asking?

That look. I’d rather that look.

I missed you today.

My New Year’s wish is to see you. To sit with you, look at you and you at me, to hear you speak. To know you again, or really for the first time.

I don’t need you to love me. I don’t need your lips on mine or your fingers in my hair or your heart racing under my palm. But to be alone with you, for a conversation, for a moment—I’d take it. It wouldn’t be enough but then again what would be?

I’ve loved you for five and a half years, and there are moments when it takes my breath away. Sometimes I forget you. Sometimes you’re a hazy and blurred and so far in the past I can’t believe I ever wanted you so much. And then, suddenly, easily, sighingly, there you are. It’s familiar, the feeling of loving you, and it centers me into myself, unites the years and faces and the many, many versions of me into one, into coherence, into everything making sense, everything leading me back here, back to you.

I’ve fallen in love since you. I’ve hoped and I’ve wept and I’ve made love, and I was closer to him than I ever was to you. I’ve made playlists and bought condoms and been heartbroken. In comparison, you and I were only a speck, a fragment of a fragment of a second that I probably should have just wrapped in nostalgia and put away.

But there you are.

I can’t explain it or explain it away. What I know is that at midnight I wished for you. What I know is that I look for you. What I know is that I love you. Still and again and with no end in sight.

Those were nights I barely slept, when every waking moment was a possibility, a step closer to life. I was seventeen then, and five and a half endless yet gone-in-an-instant years later, some days I still feel the same. Arrogance and insecurity, hope and fear, ambition and doubt. Always at the cusp of something, the right words forever at the tip of my tongue.

Amazing still it seems, I’ll be twenty-three.

For a second I thought I had it all figured out. I knew what I was doing, knew that I was good at what I was doing, knew that I would succeed. That’s the arrogance, scoffing at the insecurity that was soo a thing of the past. And now I am shaken to the core, ambition made meek and called into question, the target of resentment. I feel small and frozen in time. I stumble along, wild-eyed and lost and yearning for something still.

It’s cyclical: first a spark, then hope, success, wild confidence, untouchability. Then the tiniest tear, fissure, crack, unnoticed at the first before it grows and spreads and overtakes. Then the crash. The fall. The weakening.

That’s where I am now—at the bottom and cut down to size. Time to pick up the pieces, to learn my lesson but not wallow in its wrath. This is the time for wide-awake. The momentum has stopped and I am still. I am myself stripped away and laid bare, made vulnerable in the best way, in the way that allows for more—for clarity, for discovery, for growth.

In the hollow, a space gives way. Light streams in. You are forgiven. For your insecurity, your arrogance, your doubt, your dreams, your terror, you are forgiven. You are growing and this is how it should be, how it will always be. It is not a race to finish line, not a prize to be won. It is slow and it is steady and it stretches on to forever.

This is it. When you laid awake at seventeen, wide-eyed and breathless for tomorrow, breathless just to begin, this is what you saw, this is what you dreamt of, this is the possibility, now reality, now yours. This is your life.

He had a beautiful back, a swimmer’s back, all broad shoulders and gold skin. And he was smiling, always smiling, and it was a smile that was in his eyes, too. Being in love with him was easy. It felt natural, good, safe.

He was gone before she knew it, and in the years that followed, there were times when she became almost convinced that he’d been a fantasy, willed into life by her own loneliness and yearning for what she’d never really believed could be hers. She had known as soon as she’d met him that this would be her first and last brush with happiness, and, as her body aged and the edges of her memory softened, she remained suspended between the desire to forget and the despair at not being able to remember. It was only the memory of his back, how real and tangible and there it had been beneath her fingertips, that convinced her that he’d been there at all, that she’d been his, and that, for just a moment, she’d really been that happy.

She didn’t know which came first, seeing Adam or knowing he was there. Did the whole party’s pulse jump and quicken and howl or was it just hers? He was tanned and rumpled as ever, and she was surprised at just how easily she—her whole body—fell in tune with him.

He wove his way through the clusters, all eager to see him, to even begin to understand him, until finally, at long long last, he came to hers, and her urge to flee was kept at bay only by the overwhelming need to be near him, to be looked at by him. She hugged him in turn, not recognizing the sound of her own voice when she said hi and how are you and he echoed the same. As he continued through the crowd, her body relaxed, pulse slowing and evening, awash in a total body sigh of relief even as her chest ached at the loss of him. And as she nodded and laughed along with the faceless friends she was standing with, her attention stayed with him. Just like it had been in high school, people marveled at him, wondered, admired, envied. He was himself, fully and without shame, just as he always had been, just as none of them—herself included—could ever be. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him, not fully, and gravitated like a dance to everywhere he was not. And when she finally felt him come to stand beside her, she could not speak, could not look, couldn’t even acknowledge.

As the temperature dropped and the veil of shade inched its way along the pool and patio, she heard less and less of the conversation around her, every cell turning its manic attention to him, anxious that he might be leaving, anxious that if this turned into yet another missed opportunity, maybe she hadn’t grown all that much after all—maybe it really was that easy to regress into the person she used to be. And when she saw finally that he had begun to say his goodbyes and gather his things, her chest constricted on itself and the terror of regret sunk deep into her bones. Five years of silence between them and suddenly there he was, right in front of her, just as he’d been for the past three hours that she’d chosen to fill with avoidance and longing and regression. These were her high school classmates but they were not in high school. She was not seventeen anymore.

Her hands were shaking but she went to him. Her words ran together but she spoke to him. With him, she called her beauty into question, finding that even with the added defense of her wonderful, fantastic, oh so grown up life, nothing could shield her from feeling insecure and self-conscious and so ridiculously seventeen as she finally, five years later and probably too late, looked him in the eye and said she was sorry.

She could hear him tell her that it was okay, that it was a long time ago, that they had both learned a lot—as gracious and good as he’d always been. And though at that moment she wished that things had been (still could be?) different, she knew that it didn’t really matter. She had done it, and that weight, that regret she had conjured and clung to since a clear morning in May when the fear of love/intimacy/desire/growing up had turned her cold, could now be left to the past, left to seventeen, left and taken no further.

They hugged goodbye with vague promises to see each other soon, sometime, in the future, maybe, and as her hand rested on the thinning cloth of his t-shirt, she knew that she would never know it past this moment when it brushed across her skin during farewell, just as she had, for one night a thousand years ago, known the flying beat of his heart at the edge of her fingertips.

She headed back to the party, not watching him go, relieved and grown up and mournful that this was really the end. She had waited five years to rid herself of seventeen and actions/inactions brought on by fear, and now she was left with a loss, an absence she knew she need not refill in spite of a lingering what if.

They were not seventeen. They did not live in each other’s worlds and did not know the people they had each become at twenty two. And regardless of whatever relationship they might have had or even still could have, that likely would not change. So she laughed and talked with her friends until the sun retreated behind the hills, feeling the regret/relief of closure, feeling that there was a chance she had been awakened anew. She had found her voice, her courage, and the conviction that some things were more important than fear or pride or feeling ridiculous and oh so seventeen. In him she saw two incarnations of herself, clear as day and representing exactly how far she had come. And more than the what ifs, the maybes, the all that could have beens, what mattered was that she had spoken, that she had looked him in the eye and proved to both of them that she had grown, she had learned, and that she was no longer the same person who at seventeen had been paralyzed and muted by her own fear. She was a little bit older and a little bit wiser, and racing heart/shaking hands/stumbling words aside, for now, that was enough.