I searched her face, trying to figure out if those tears were hers, or echoes of mine, but she was too focused, too committed to her role to reveal her internal world to me. She wasn’t there to give, only to take, to hold, and to release. I felt warmth in her neutrality though. Not the rejection I had expected and deserved, but tenderness, and the wide-open heart I’d always known her to have.

I leaned forward and tried to peer deeper into her. She and I have uncannily similar eyes. The same gray circles around the same redwood-brown irises. Maybe that was part of our connection, I thought. We saw ourselves in each other. Two sides of the same moon. The light and the dark.

I watched her take me in and wondered how I looked to her. I was in gray cords and a green flannel over an old T-shirt. I wished I’d dressed better and gotten a haircut. My nose was running from the crying and I wanted to wipe it on my sleeve, but no way was I going to let go of her hands.

For weeks I’d been imagining what I was going to say, entertaining the inane notion that I would be able to speed-explain the last three years of my life: where I’d been, what I’d been doing, why I’d come back. There was no place for that. The space felt too sacred to be filled up with banal specifics. I wanted to be poetic, not prosaic. Though what I ended up expressing was mostly just a series of apologetic tangents.