Portals

I woke a few weeks ago to something strange, little sweetheart. When I powered up my MacBook and opened the mail program, it settled on an email not from the previous day or a new one from that morning but from one dated May 28, 2009. I didn’t know why. May 28 this year comes tomorrow. Is it meant to be a sign, do you think? Is it a day I should observe, I should mark? Is it the day that you will come for me, at last?

I wondered if maybe something magic might happen were I to open it, to reply. Would it take me through a portal to you, my love? Or to you and to those deliriously happy days with you? A portal – like in that movie we liked so much, the one we got from the sweet little video store there in the Inner Sunset just around the corner from your apartment. How we watched it together sitting on your bed and holding hands so tightly we didn’t even realize anymore that we were until the movie was over. We were one.

Do you remember, my little sweetheart? A portal!

I remember one other time something like this happening. It was shortly after your tragic passing, my love. I was still in NorCal, staying with Chris & Sheri, all my things gathered from your apartment, my life with you there now in shopping bags and crammed along with my person into the abandoned nursery in the back of their ranch house in Marin – children’s toys, a mini-bunkbed and me. One morning I opened my laptop and saw a new email, an invitation from Virgin America to check-in online and print a boarding pass for the flight I had already taken six weeks before to come see you. I just sat there staring at it. I wondered and prayed that if I clicked on the link there, that somehow it would take me back in time to February 12 to make the flight from JFK all over again and that you would meet me at the kiss-and-drive at SFO like always and I would hold you and hold you so tight, just like holding hands on your bed, and never let you go, never let any harm come to you, never ever be torn from you again.

A portal, Summer. A portal, my little sweetheart.

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, my love. I never do. But if May 28 is meant to be the day you finally come for me and this email from six years ago is here to tell me that, a sign to say, “get ready”, I welcome it. I welcome it with all my heart. And I am ready, my little sweetheart. I am ready and only waiting for you…