Finding her was like finding a part of myself that, for eighteen years, I had never known was missing. It was a wonderful surprise. People have left my life before…people who were important to me, but in time, the space they left behind filled with other people and pursuits. With her, it’s different. Even now, two years after she left me and this city for Costa Rica and the misty coasts of California, there is still a place for her, the edges healed over like an ear piercing or a belly button – proof of an event that fundamentally altered what once was. This space determinedly refuses to be filled, even at times when there is no room anyplace else in my life, as if since her, everyone I have met is simply passing through.

I think that maybe she is my match in the collective unconscious. It’s not that we always agreed, though we did think alike. The truth is more that we were perfect complements.

She didn’t know it then, but she was headed for more snow. I expect, though I can’t say from experience, that snow in Philadelphia is very different from snow in the mountains of Arizona. Where she came from, she was never long out of sight of the ocean, and the weather was always that perfect sixty-two degrees and dry that allowed her to spend the whole year barefoot and in cable-knit sweaters. She saw the city differently than I did. To her, it was a quarry of concrete boxes holding prisoners who were there by virtue of their own inertia. When I looked, as I sometimes did, I saw shining glass towers or houses, centuries old, many wanting from years of neglect, but all of it with so much potential! She was more realistic than I was, at the time, or maybe the contrast between cedars and asphalt was just too much, but either way, she recoiled.

She drew back until nothing in the city could touch her, including we who wanted to reach out to her, and eventually she had to go. I think he and I had always known that she was seeking something from the world. She would go wherever she had to go to find it, or maybe she just liked the going.

I think she knows that we have this. It’s something I could imagine myself imagining, granting unwarranted importance to one individual in my lifetime – my very own “one that got away” – but, I don’t think it’s just me. We talk hardly ever, though I expect that as she climbs a mountain to get to class today while the shadows are still long in the west, she may think of me…knowing that I think of her.