At the Lighthouse 40 Years Later

– Two words before goodnight?

– Make me enjoy, I'm excited.

This was the beginning of their online relationship, sparked by chance in a tasteless public chat room on an early January night.

Maybe he wanted to say what he heard from her, but he settled for something romantic.

She might have liked to start with something romantic, but she wrote what she thought he was looking for.

Either way, this was the start of a strong, powerful, inexorable relationship. Binding.

They tried to end it, but every night they were back, talking about themselves. About each other.

Same books, same disappointments, same dreams. Two little girls, almost the same age, completed the circle.

They wrote to each other at night, her shifts allowed it. He was free at home until the morning. Sometimes they even talked from their beds, while beside them, their respective partners were busy on social media.

But despite it all, their relationships with their partners were still too strong. Neither of them could take the leap into the unknown, breaking everything for something online that offered no certainty except its constant, pervasive presence in their thoughts.

Guilt tied them to the past, while dreams pulled them toward the future. Dreams illuminated by the Breton lighthouse of Ar-Men, which they often talked about and where they dreamed of living, isolated from everything.

They decided to close definitively, without ever meeting, nor seeing each other in photographs or speaking on the phone. To conclude to ease the pain of the loss, with an absurd promise: to meet in person, along the Breton coast, at the sight of the lighthouse, 40 years later.

And so it was.

Now the scene changes radically. 40 years have passed, and the world has gotten much worse, but we don't have to worry about that, at least not for now.

He has been a widower for about ten years, and his daughter is a researcher abroad.

It is the morning of January 2, and between his fingers stained with old age, the piece of paper from 40 years ago still shows the dates, time and place of the appointment.

A small tourist bar, it resisted time and the sharp wind that tears the skin from the face.

After three hours he is still alone. An absurd appointment, he had always maintained, but he could not die without having looked her in the eyes at least once.

But maybe she had died first. Maybe 40 years had been a choice that was really too far away. Maybe she had forgotten about the appointment. Maybe she had not thought about it anymore.

And while a thousand regrets and suppositions make their way into her mind, the door of the room opens, and in the frame full of wind and clouds, she faces a figure that she knows very well, that she struggles to recognize, and yet it is her.

And in a second she understood everything. He understood how things cannot be changed, how feelings can become indestructible, how time is a simple insignificant variable, how every human being keeps a secret life, sometimes even from themselves.

His daughter, surprised and wide-eyed, was walking toward him.

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