I remember someone once saying her name and something about ‘Cambridge’, but I never believed it.

Until tonight, when she’s standing 100 feet from me, and even her laugh sounds British. She looks strikingly familiar, and I wonder why I didn’t notice until someone pointed her out to me; but the more I watch her out of the corner of my eye, I realize that she’s not as familiar as I thought.

It’s been ten years; she’s bound to have changed from the woman I loved into the woman standing with her friends, gossiping like they haven’t talked in years. Which is probably true.

And then all of sudden there she is; standing in front of me with her green eyes starring at me like that decade hasn’t passed and we’re still two foolish teenagers in love.

“I think we’ve met before.”

For all we had been, and been through, I realize this is what we’ve been reduced to. Ironic song lyrics we used to sing on Sunday afternoon drives around the city, never realizing that one day they would apply to us in a way we had never counted on. We hadn’t counted on a lot of things back then; life had been simple in a way that defined our own reality. And maybe that had been our biggest mistake all those years ago: that we didn’t count on the truth of real world reality.

“I think so too.”

She smiles and I’m seventeen again, sitting beside her in history class when she knew an answer. The world goes on around as it has all night, but for a moment it’s just us existing; lost somewhere between bitter promises and chaste kisses and the lingering air of teenage dreams are the people we had once been, what we had once been existing tonight again only in our memories, in this moment.

I wonder if she can see into my soul as I stare into hers; each blink of her emerald eyes speaking a thousand stories of love and anger, and of a journey away from and back to this same building where we met and fell in love sometime between 8 and 3. I’m sure she is, for no one else has ever been able to read me better, and I’m glad she can because it means that somewhere beneath the porcelain skin she’s still seventeen and as uniquely perfect as the night I first kissed her.

“There’s one thing I want to say….”
“So you’ll be brave?” I ask.

For a moment I think we’re both going to laugh, but lips merely twitch as she brushes her auburn hair off her shoulders, exposing pale shoulders I notice are now adorned with permanent colored ink.

“I’m not sorry there’s nothing to say.”

It would have been funny if it hadn’t been true; we could have made small talk and give meaningless answers to meaningless questions if it had really been that important. But we had said all there was to say years ago and today is merely a formality because neither of us would ever tell the other what we each really wanted to know- how we actually were.

So we speak in lyrics and in stares, and in the gentle skim of her hand over my forearm I’m told everything she knows I need to know, but nothing more. She’s always got to leave something for mystery as we stumble back to the reality we once ignored for so long. Tomorrow she’ll go home to Cambridge and I’ll go back to every day, and we’ll both pretend that ten years have healed all wounds and four thousand miles has given us new loves and that tonight neither of us saw ‘what if’ in the other’s soul.