Beginning All Over Again

Now and again, I stop to consider the facts of the life I've lived, including all the facts known only to me, or me and a few others. Of course, no other person can ever fully know what we know about ourselves, but my particular life has taken such strange and unpredictable turns here and there that it might as well be considered fiction.

It's been a life of romance in many senses of the term. Just when things have seemed bleak, a new twist in the plot turns up, surprising even me once again.

I should know better by now.

Very few people would fully believe some parts of my story if I ever should decide to tell them. It would require suspending the usual assumptions about reality and being willing to go down a long path far into the distant past, to another time in a distant place when I was still young.

It was far out in the country. It was a rainy night, to be our last together. We were running through the rain holding hands. She was crying at the prospect that our brief relationship was about to come to its end.

I felt just as bad, but I wasn't crying. I was trying to think. She was a mess; by some conceit or another we had conspired so that she was guiding me back from the house where we had dinner and the place she was staying the night to the place where I was to sleep, across town.

Not a soul was out in the weather but us, dripping with rain.

We ducked into a doorway and I held her. She wanted us to stay right there and for our embrace to never end. She asked me to love her right there in the middle of the night in the middle of the rain.

I wouldn't. I couldn't. This seemed way too risky, me a foreigner in a small town where everyone would know who I was, if only indirectly. The porch light was on; we were exposed.

She shuddered in my arms; I stroked her wet black hair, and moved her bangs back from her face as I gently kissed her.

We stayed like that for a while; then I insisted on taking her back to the place she was staying because I knew how to get to "my" place without further help. I reminded her that this was not our last moment; there would be tomorrow when she took me to the local airport.

That would be the place for our last goodbye.

***

Memories like this one, still so vivid many years after my own dark hair turned grey, then white, and after the lines of age started creasing my face, are parts of the stories never told.

Stories that I always assumed were safely tucked away in the past, where they could be remembered fondly, like the smiles in old photographs or the sounds of voices that no longer can be heard among the living.

***

But the past doesn't always rest in peace. Sometimes, against all odds, it reappears. When this happens, it may be because it never actually got finished. Something remained undone, unsaid, unfelt even. Something remained to resurface, to happen again.

Now it is another night, half a world away, and again it is raining. But this time there will be no tears, because this time there need be no final goodbye. An unfinished chapter in our story has asserted its right to continue.

That's the way of a narrative. That's the way of romance. Stories don't end when it's convenient for them to do so; they continue with their own purpose in mind. No one would believe this story; no one.

And who can say if it even is real? Maybe all is fiction. Only the nights know, and the rains. Two nights, two rains, two people.

And thus the story goes on...

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