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The Ones We Don’t Get to Keep
There’s beauty in letting someone walk out of your life
The summer of my 15th year, I visited a friend in a town two hours away and met a friend of her’s. He was different in the most beautiful way. Smart and poetic with an old soul. I was done in an instant.
We exchanged addresses because that’s what you did back then. We never called. We never emailed. It didn’t seem right. We wrote each other letters every week for a year.
We would see each other only twice the entire duration of our college years. The letters came and went.
After college, I wrote to him and told him I loved him. I dropped the letter in the mailbox before I could take it back. The letter and the words. Two days later, he got in his old International Scout and drove two hours to show up on my doorstep, give me one of the greatest kisses of my life and then got back in his car and drove home.
Our young love affair spanned seven years, during which we spent only 10 days in each other’s presence. I kept a box of every letter, with the pretty handwriting and the painted envelopes, until I married my first husband and felt it was a betrayal to keep them.
He passed through my life leaving…
