Yesterday my daughter asked me if my heart had ever skipped a beat. I lied, even though she 
would have understood the truth. All night I lay awake wondering if it also happened to you in 
that moment on the stairs? You and your friend and me and mine, coming and going from the 
Christmas party, locking eyes but not saying a word because there was no time and too much to 
say. It had been two years since you’d said goodbye in a letter that I still keep inside a book on 
my shelf (Sometimes I pretend not to remember which one). I didn’t know it would be the last 
time I saw you. I heard you became a lawyer, married, had a daughter. Lost your husband in a car
accident, moved to another country. I might have come for you then but did not know until years 
later when it was too late. If I’m honest, everything in my life has worked out despite my best 
efforts to muck it up. The woman on the other side of the wall beside this desk has been far better 
to me than I deserve. I see now, even more with each word that I write, how she is the love of my 
life when for the longest time I thought it was you. If you’re reading this, know I thought of you 
often as time passed slowly, then quicker, now like a runaway train. It turned from sadness to 
warmth in a year I can’t remember, a gratitude for having loved and been loved when the world 
was almost too much for me. I must go now and tell her that she is the love of my life, before it’s 
too late. But first, do you remember that time we held hands in Bryant Park and it started to rain? 
The rain came without warning from a clear summer sky. Everyone ran for cover but we just 
kept on walking. We walked and walked until we reached the apartment, looking at each other,
smiling, hardly saying a word. Sometimes I imagine we are still walking together somewhere in 
another life, in a place I’ve never been and hope never to find.