SERIES: LETTERS I NEVER WROTE

Dear TA,

On the first night I met you, you told me that one of your favorite books was One Hundred Years of Solitude. You said I should read it. Now, after a month of loving you and another month of living without you, I found an image that perhaps you unconsciously sent me looking for. It’s on page 362, so it took me a while. There’s no way you remember this sentence, hidden in a paragraph hidden in a chapter, but it is the sentence that connects us through these pages and onto the one I now write.

“He saw the gloomy old man with his crow’s-wing hat like the materialization of a memory that had been in his head since long before he was born.”

That is what happened when I met you. When I saw your mysterious eyes, heard your name, and touched your arm in the lunch line. Something stirred in me, like I already knew you in some buried and dark way from before I was born. From another lifetime that neither of us can remember. Meeting you, I had no choice but to believe in reincarnation.

Given this, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that we were doomed this time around. Finding you again brought me alive in ways this life had never known, but I suppose we also brought baggage from the last life into this one. It made things intensely wonderful, but in the end, must have contained something we didn’t know how to heal. You left, eventually saying things were just so good that it scared you. I was shattered.  Our relationship was a wolf in sheep clothing.

Perhaps I owe an apology from something long long ago, but you owe the apology this time around. It matters to me because I feel that our evolutions are intertwined. I want you to be a better, bigger, braver man than this, because who knows what future lives we have ahead.

I’ll catch you on the flipside.

Love,

Recognizing You