There and Back Again - In the End

I wrote this months ago but I wasn't sure if I wanted to share it. I'd like to think this is the end of my There and Back Again story - if it can be called one...

 I have imagined you coming back to me in so many ways.

 Blue sky in Toronto and the sunlight scatters off your white doctor’s coat, as you throw your arms wide for an embrace. But I keep my distance as I’ve always had, and now more than ever with this wall of years between us.

Well, you insist we drive somewhere, maybe Niagra Falls or the CN Tower, and catch up on the way. Yes, you drive now. And as the kilometers roll by, and the sun shifts its position, lighting up your face, your skin, throwing your features into relief, I begin to remember the way I used to feel. I remember you leaning over a school window, the memory of you frozen in laughter. I remember all our songs, and I have to shake my head to clear it, I have to redraw the line between the then and the now.

Even though I catch you looking at me in that peculiar way you had when we were kids, unaware of the future, that wisftul, faraway look you used to sometimes give me when you thought I wasn’t paying attention. I always knew what it meant though I feigned ignorance. I memorized it, preserved it in my downtrodden memory.

And  I recognize it now, but pretend not to. I point out landmarks instead, giving you a tour of the country I call home now, a country to which I know I’ll never really belong.

We have such a good time; we don’t realize the day’s slipped by until we watch the last of the sun dipping beneath the horizon, and then I can no longer deny that familiar sinking feeling in my heart. I know what it’s like to lose you so well. I have worn it like you would wear an ugly pair of old PJs that you just can’t seem to let go of, because little pieces of yourself still belong to them, because you have grown up in them, and know their shape and size and texture by heart, because familiarity has turned the intital discomfort they offered into comfort and you’d rather keep them than exchange them for the strangeness of new clothes. No matter, I did it once, I can do it again, I tell myself.

But as we pull up at my apartment building, before I can reach out and unlock the car door, with the car’s engine still running, you say those four words I realize I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear. For a minute I feel certain my brain must have imagined them, because for once in our lives, the ball is no longer in your court; you have passed it to me.

I stare at you confusedly, your face awash with the streetlight’s mellow glow, until you repeat them, and erase all doubt from my mind;

‘Will you marry me?’

Why did you even feel the need to ask? Could my answer have ever been anything but yes?