Signs

“Do you want to write again?” he asked, shifting in a creaking seat, tapping a pen against the desk.

“Yes. But I’m finding it hard,” I replied. “I no longer write the way I used to. My heart was different then.”

“So what’s changed about your writing?”

For awhile I stared blankly, thinking about the hundreds of physical pages I had written on almost every day for the past several years. Journal upon journal of scrawled rambling depth, emotion, fear,  joy, and sadness; sentences riddled with epiphany and revelation while my blog collected dust at a dormant domain on the web.

“My writing is like me. I’m not who I used to be anymore. And a part of this is good, I think.”

“Go on,” he said, straightening up. I sat there with all of my gifted discernment thinking I should have gone into this profession for myself.

The year taught me a great deal about myself; my awkwardness, insecurities, newly formed lack of self-confidence, the expansion of my introversion and the slow diminishment of my extraversion. For a moment there in that cold room I fantasized about what it would be like to reunite with her or to meet her now for the first time as the man I am today, a wiser, more mature, humbled man. So much had changed. Everything had changed. The world, for that matter, had changed, vastly. In my family there were pregnancies, deaths, and diagnoses. Friends had gotten married, I’d explored more places than ever, met more new people than I had since college, had new favorite shows and read several amazing books. I was now living a whole new life in a whole new place, far removed from where I once was physically, mentally, spiritually; no longer struggling to get by. 

“You know, it’s funny,” I said. “I was on that Timehop app a few days back and it pulled up one of my Instagram posts from two years ago, sometime in November of 2014, a month before she came into my life. I was living in Ocean City, and I took a photo of a jetty with a sign that read: ‘Danger, keep off.’ I always try to think of the perfect quote or lyric to pair with my photos and for some reason that day I chose ‘The Wish’ by Beau Taplin. It said:

‘Be careful what you wish for? Screw that. I don’t care if we only last three months, two weeks or a few short minutes. And I don’t give a damn if it hurts like hell to lose you. Love doesn’t need to last a lifetime to be worth it. If all else fails, give me something to treasure, to look back on, to hold in my heart forever.'”

It was the ultimate foreshadowing, since it was a jetty where the veil was at last lifted, the wind blew her hair across the corner of her smile and I fell madly in love. The forever kind.

“Perhaps I should’ve obeyed the sign,” I said.

“You’re too receptive,” he declared. A solemness hung heavy over the room like a pending storm.

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked, wondering how I ever even got there.