Once... too tender to share.

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Goodness, several years ago (I can't remember just how long now), an old high-school sweetheart got in touch with me again. It had been almost 30 years! The throb in my heart after hearing his voice beat just as hard for him then as it once did. I was mesmerized. It took my breath away! I was flattered. I was dumb-founded. Everything in me swayed!


We talked back and forth for a little while. Mostly emailed, rarely voice to voice. I've always wished we could be friends, despite the warning from my mother that said we never could. She was right, you know? It didn't take us long to both see it. The tie was too strong. The feelings too deep. We'd shared too much. We have too much fun. We enjoy too much our cute-ness together. A surface-friendship won't ever be enough.


So. When we realized the danger, we both backed off. Dreading the parting that had to come, it tore at both of our hearts. Before closing the door to our communication, he sent me the video below. I cried like an idiot while watching it. It had captured every feeling I'd felt! The picture voiced what my words would never be able to say. The wouldn't-let-go-ness of the lion in his happy over the reuniting, was the same didn't-want-to-let-go-ness in me all over again in our own reunion. And, too, the song.... I don't know if he had realized in advance the meaning of the song that sang as it played. But it, too, was a yesterday's memory... a yesterday's feeling that never went away. Wildly, though it's different, it still fits today.


I told him at the end that I'd heard a guy say something in a movie that reminded me of him. He said, "I think I'd miss you even if we had never met." Yeah, I said, I know that feeling. But mostly, I know that feeling that misses you not because we didn't, but because we once did.


I don't know why... but I was thinking about him today. The memory of his sweetness made me cry. Crazily, I thought I was past that. After wallowing in sorrow for quite a while after our parting, I thought that I'd toughened up. I thought I was past this. I thought I'd grown hard. Today.... just now... bringing it all up again, made me realize that my tough-ness wasn't tough at all... my "tough" was a masquerading lie. Some things you'll never forget. Some things you'll never not love........... 


And some things........(because of all that)???? You stay very, very, very far away from! :)

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