Taking a Chance

"Is this seat taken?" I hear a voice ask as I enjoy my lunch in the office cafeteria.

Looking up from my sautéed salmon I see a young woman holding a tray and motioning towards the open chair across my table. She awaits my reply, but for a moment sees only a confused expression as I glance to either side and notice the myriad vacant tables.

"Please, have a seat," I reply. "My name is..."

"Bobby," she interrupts, much to my surprise. "I've seen you around the office. We sit a few cubicles away from each other and I've been meaning to introduce myself. My name is Heather."

"Heather....well, it is nice to meet you."

"You too," she says. She fidgets a bit in her seat and uses her fork to push the food around her plate until finally she asks, "So, how do you like working at Freddie Mac so far?"

She smiles when she asks her questions. Her voice, trembling ever so slightly, betrays her anxiety but I do not mind. Rather, I find it endearing. It reminds me of someone from my past, a girl I used to know so long ago...she reminds me of you Ornela.

For an hour we talk over lunch. She tells me that she has lived in DC her entire life and asks if I have ever visited the city before moving here. I lie and tell her that this is my first time away from home. I do not tell her that I lived here six years ago. I do not tell her that this city is where I should have settled down with someone very dear to me. In a way I am telling her the truth, for coming back to DC this time feels so very different than my initial arrival. The thrill is no longer there. The magic is gone. I suppose that trying to rekindle the feelings you once had for something is always a struggle, and it is never quite the same the second time around.

This girl that I enjoyed lunch with reminded me so much of you Ornela. In appearance perhaps there were some incongruities, her hair slightly lighter, her face not quite so beautiful. But in mannerisms she was your twin. There was a gentleness about her that I have only ever felt with you, and for the first time in so very long I felt like I was with you again. For the first time in four months I felt like I was speaking to you apart from my letters.

My letters. My journal...my only voice to you. I have long since exhausted new things to say to you and am simply repeating myself at this point, but when I write I feel close to you, and that feeling alone gives me the strength to continue. If I knew that you were still reading this journal I would write you every day just to tell you that I have never forgotten you...just to tell you how much I still think about you Ornela. I have always believed that you are still reading my letters to you in this journal, but truthfully I do not know. To believe that you still read this journal is wishful optimism on my part, perhaps even a fool's hope. In reality, these letters I write probably go unread by you or anyone else. But if you are still reading my journal after four months apart, after three years since we last held each other close, then I know it must be because you are trying to keep your promise to me...a promise to try to rekindle a relationship we began through our simple letters. Do you remember Ornela? Do you remember the letters that you used to write me too? On one of our last nights together three years ago you showed me all of the letters we exchanged on eHarmony in the months before we met. You had saved everything...every letter where we first got to know each other, every story from our past that we were just beginning to share, every loving word that we had ever said to one another. If you still have those letters, I hope that you will read them again, for they helped bring us closer together. They let us into each other's hearts.  

After being in DC for only a few weeks now, I have made a sobering realization: I should have moved to Boston for the job with Starbucks. It is the job that I really wanted rather than the one I accepted in DC, but I didn't move to Boston because I thought it would be unbearably painful to live in the same city with you without ever being able to see you. Now I see that the city I live in makes no difference. We could live on opposite sides of the world or even next door to each other and I would still feel just as distant from you. Maybe moving to Boston would have somehow changed things between us. I kept imagining that one day I would hear a knock at my door and I would open it to see you standing there. It seems ridiculous to hope for such things, I know, but I always remembered the words you told me in that first letter back in June: "My wish was to come find you in Atlanta (and) hug you." I knew that if you were once willing to come find me, perhaps that day might finally come.

Despite  living 400 miles south of you, I still think about you every day. Whenever my mind is not distracted by work or the business of life, it usually reminisces over you. I wonder sometimes about how your day is going, if you are busy with work in the lab or out on the town having a good time with your friends. Sometimes I even wonder if you are reading this journal and thinking about me too, maybe as part of your morning routine, in a spare moment at work, or just before you go to bed. In those moments it is almost as if we are together again. It is almost as if you have asked me to be with you. I only wish that rather than speaking to each other through my journal we could see one another in person. Even now, if you asked I would leave everything in DC behind to be with you in Boston. I would quit my job tomorrow, pack everything into my car, and drive 400 miles north if you asked me to. I would do that -- for you Ornela. I would leave everything behind just to be with you.

You know me better than anyone in the world, and you know that I do not believe in anything supernatural, or gods, or silly superstitions. But I do believe in fate. I believe if two people are meant to be with each other, somehow, someway they will end up together. Their paths may occasionally go in different directions, so much so that at times the two people walking those paths might even lose sight of each other. But if they are truly meant to be together, their paths will always eventually intersect and bring them back together again. Our paths have diverged and reconnected more times than I can remember, and by all accounts we should have long since moved on by now, yet here we are right now, me speaking to you through my letters and you listening to my words. We are always drawn to each other. We are always drawn back together.

I cannot convince you to give our relationship another chance any more than I can convince a leopard to change its spots or a rainbow to change its colors. Nor can I convince you to fall in love with me again or even speak to me. These are things that are purely yours to give to whomever your heart chooses. But what I can do is simply tell you that I love you, that I will always love you, and that whether or not you ever choose to invite me into your heart again, I will never push you out of mine.

Maybe our timing was all wrong. Maybe the distance was too great for us to overcome. Maybe we really are just not right for each other. But we never got to try...we never got to have a real relationship to truly see if our love would make it, and I will always wonder what might have been if we had only taken that chance.

I still love you Ornela. I simply want to be with you.