I stood there in the airport, and looked around at the crowd for a while, looking for her, but not seeing anyone's face anyway. My mind was too full--I couldn't concentrate enough to breathe, let alone focus my eyes. I wasn't alive in the airport; I was a year ago, when I first knew her, first touched her, first held her in my arms. All this despite the fact that we had really only been acquaintances, and had only been as close as friends might that night.
We were never lovers; it was mutually impossible. Two countries, with an ocean between...Too young, with a fear of losing ourselves...To leave soon, with a reality of perhaps never meeting again floating silently in front of us. We were never lovers; it was never discussed.
But we were close for one night--close enough so that we felt the chance of there being more all around us, like the blanket we shared--offering warmth if we wrapped it around ourselves, but the potential to smother us if we weren't careful. And the certainty that we would leave ourselves alone in the cold when we had to part, since paradoxically a blanket that covered two was too small to shield only one....
So, feeling that certainty, and seeing that potential, we did what only we could, and forewent the warmth as well, seeking instead the feebler (though still magnificent) comfort offered by a close and lasting friendship. We parted, without tears, and we wrote--all year we sent letters back and forth, and solidified that friendship until it was one of the unmistakable and unalterable truths in our lives.
So the year, of course, sped round in its cliched way; each of us busily occupied with our separate pursuits, and brought together at the whim of the post. When she knew she was coming back again, I was filled with that bittersweet mixture of elation and terror we all have felt. Perhaps this year there would be more; perhaps this year I would break our indestructible friendship with the only thing that could touch it: the chance of intimacy.
And I stood there in the airport, an airport suddenly teeming with people in the way it only can when a single one of them is the person most important to you in the world, and I was blind as I looked for her. We did spot each other at the same time, as in the ending of a romantic movie of separated lovers made in the 40s, and I shattered that similie and lived in the 90s by walking over to her, and her two travelling companions, and saying, "Hello;" I hugged her, and wondered if her guts were twisting as much as mine.