On a snowy day in December 2011, I spent a day with a girl and never told anyone – not a soul – about it. I know that the face of those words might seem to foreshadow some mad affair, intense fling, or seduction that left me indelibly marked, wounded, haunted by longing, but it was none of those things. The truth of it is that I remember very few details of what we did that day. The ones I do remember are less memories than they are images that anchor feelings that still feel as tender now as they did then. Unlike the affairs, flings, and seductions that colored my days when I was, in fact, haunted by longing, that day in December nourished me in a way that I still don't understand.
Unlike those whose lives – and lips, hands, bodies, and sheets – brushed up against mine, only to disappear into wildly incompatible worlds, never to be seen again, that day was not the last time I saw her. As I think back on it now, though, I know that it was the last time I saw that version of her, the version that I had first loved desperately and immaturely in a years-long haze of gin and pain. When I met her that morning, however, it felt like I was seeing her for the first time.
She was radiant, and I loved differently then.
When I think about that day, I remember snow on the ground and flakes in the air. It was cold enough for gloves, because I remember her allowing her gloved hand to slip into mine – the first time I had held another person's hand in a year, maybe two – and thinking about Ben Hecht's "Snowfall in Childhood." I must have worn my trashed Barbour jacket, because it was the only jacket besides a Brooks Brothers navy blazer that I owned at the time. I definitely wore the gray Scottish cashmere scarf – my signature, saved from many bars and hotel rooms, and now retired – given to me by a girlfriend years earlier.
Memories are always imagined. Softened, hardened, dulled, sharpened, sometimes assigned to oblivion, sometimes etched so deep that they sting at the slightest suggestion. When the weather cools and the branches on the pin oaks and sugar maples go from flickering autumn flames to exhausted winter wicks, I can all but feel her next to me. I can feel the stir of excitement that came with wanting to lose myself in those hours walking through midtown, contented with her presence. I was as certain of that moment's ephemerality as I was of its eternity, that it would linger like a kiss, a caress, a strand of hair on a cashmere scarf. I never spoke of it except in passing with her and I never wrote about it, not even privately, for fear that allowing any of it to crystallize into words would rob all of it of its power. I was afraid for a long time of it becoming another piece of writing, even after – perhaps especially after – she married, had a daughter, divorced, and lived a life that seemed to only stay connected to mine through occasional text messages and, more rarely, letters.
On a rainy night in December, 11 years later, she introduced me to her two-year-old daughter, who instinctively reached up to hold my hand. As I gently took it, I thought about those winters and marveled at what I imagined my life might look like in some alternate universe where I am not a vessel of fading scars and regret, nourishing me in a way I still don't understand.
I can write this now because I can admit and feel secure what I have always known: that we're connected by more than occasional text messages and rare letters, because even now, every time I see her, it feels like I am seeing her for the first time.
She is radiant.