I had fallen madly in love with her as a 16 year old and wildly, almost unbelievably, she loved me back.

By the time we were 18 I felt closer to her than anyone in my life. In any other era, I would have married her. But in the 1990s United States, I instead left to attend Prestigious University, many hours away.

By Thanksgiving we had broken up. We kept in touch here and there throughout undergrad. (She attended some pretend college to major in French. I chased status and sluts.)

At one point her parents were divorcing and she prepared and mailed me some perfumed box. It contained a candle ("light this when life is dark..."), letters she had written me, a mix tape cassette, trinkets from high school (the cross she wore around her neck that we joked about when I would fondle her teenage tits), printed out Kodak photographs of us smiling at the lake, sitting on the hood of her Grand Wagoneer, etc. She wrote some cover letter about how distraught she was over the divorce, how alone she felt, was love real, where was God, where was her life going.

I shoved the whole thing in a closet.

By graduation from undergrad, I wanted her back. I had gotten arrested, was drinking a real lot, my soul was broken, I hated everything about the prestigious college, etc. I tried to simply waltz back into the old relationship. Lol. She rejected me. I did not handle this "well", and at one point chainsawed a tree on her family's farm that we first had sex under. She got "scared" of me, and cut off all contact.

I am so old that this was largely pre-internet. So cutting off contact really meant complete disappearance. By the time the internet did arrive, I was already blocked there as well.

Decades passed.

I was home for a reunion of sorts, and this past Saturday she walked down the path just in front of me.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5899437&forum_id=2],#50107131)

We both kind of stood there, silently. We made small talk, dumb and awkward.

If Im going to be candid - and Im xo-retired so why not - I had imagined and literally dreamed about and prepared for the moment for decades. My mother had died just a moment before I met this girl, and so she very much became tangled up in my adolescent sense of love and womanhood and everything.

And when I lost her, I lost everything. And for decades I probably could have searched her out. I know certain things. I knew towns she lived in and rumors and such. Certainly I stayed away because it hurt too much. Because she was idyllic and 17 and tan and buttery blonde in my memory. (The first time I ever really munched box we had snuck into a chapel in the woods. The pews had been removed and there was just a wood floor, piney smelling. We did our usual making out, but it went farther that time and her pants came off. She lay with her legs open in front of me, in the dark, on the chapel floor, and I marveled that even her little tangle of pubic hair - this was the 90s - was blonde.)

I desperately wanted to see her and find her, and in some ways my entire life has always been a disaster for the lack of her. I, lmao lol, never loved my wife. I loved this girl.

But I also couldnt see her, needed her to remain far away and perfect etc.

But for all the years I dreamed of the meeting.

Anyway, it happened. We did the stupid talk, where do you work (she works at my old elementary school; Im a lolyer), are you married (she yes, me divorced), kids (yes, both)... all that nonsense.

Thankfully everyone at the reunion was drinking hard, and we too began drinking hard. And after sunset I said, let's go walk up the hill. They have now a climbing course up there for campers. But there was a weird spider-webby rope thing, and before I knew it she slipped up through the ropes to lay in it, above 5 feet off the ground. I kept trying to follow, but she weighs like 105 lbs and I could not fit through the hole.

I finally, awkwardly, flipped myself in. And we lay there, suspended above earth, and connected in the dark.

I know it sounds ludicrous, and sentimentalist. But God is not only real, but extremely mysterious, not probably not quite who we think he is. But I was only supposed to see this girl now, hanging in this net under the stars, off the ground, half-an-old-man already. All the other decades since I am supposed to have been alone. The loneliness, the hurt, the fucked-up things... its been, weirdly, His plan.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5899437&forum_id=2],#50107462)