There You Are

There You Are

I saw you before I understood what was happening. One moment I was just another young mother out for a rare night in Cambridge, and the next my soul was singing like it had finally spotted the lighthouse it had been scanning the horizon for across lifetimes. “There you are,” it said, as if relieved, as if exhausted, as if it had been waiting for me to catch up.

It was 1987, in a funky little Irish pub tucked into Porter Square, the kind of place where the floors were sticky and the Guinness was warm and the music was always a little too loud. You were ten feet away with your band, tuning your guitar like you had all the time in the world, and you kept staring at me. I remember thinking it felt like a Keith Whitley song had stepped off the radio and taken human form. I remember thinking, Lord, why is this good old boy looking at me like that. Like I was already his.

And then the truth hit me with the force of a freight train. Julie, that ain’t no boy. That’s a man. And oh hell. I married the wrong one.

I had never thought of you in any terms except the ones that whispered we were meant to be married. Not in this life, maybe, but in some other dimension where time folds in on itself and souls recognize what bodies forget. I knew it instantly. I had been yours for eternity.

You stood there like some big working man carved out of Tennessee clay, ten years and a whole generation older than me. I could smell whiskey and cigarettes drifting off you from ten feet away, and you looked at me like you were grateful I wasn’t a child, even though you thought I might be. Your long scruffy blond hair was combed back like a bad-boy Conway Twitty, your sideburns rough and scratchy down your jawline, trying so hard to look like an outlaw. It was almost a caricature, because that wasn’t you at all. But God help me, I wanted to kiss those sideburns. I wanted to breathe in that whiskey-and-smoke scent that was so unmistakably you. And eventually, I did.

You wore a black sleeveless t-shirt stretched tight across a chest built from years of football and competitive swimming. A turquoise bolo tie hung around your neck like it had wandered onto the wrong man, but somehow it worked. Only you could pull off a bolo tie with a t-shirt. Baggy white running pants and tan work boots completed the look, and I remember thinking you were so not my type. Even though my soul and DNA were screaming otherwise.

I was used to bloodless Harvard boys. You were heat and danger and volcanic promise. You were the kind of love that could not be described or resisted. And I sat there like a snotty little Boston girl pretending I was too good for you, like I had done in so many lifetimes before. I was in trouble. Deep trouble. Because this was fate. This was Divine. This had been set in motion millions of years ago. We were “us,” and we had always been “us.”

I refused to look back at you, but I felt your eyes burning into me. Blue eyes that should have been cool and calm but instead flared like the center of a flame. They asked me silently, “Yes, here I am and there you are. Now what are we going to do.”

With all the arrogance I could muster, I finally turned and flashed my sad little wedding rings at you, gripping my husband’s arm like he was everything I would ever need. You saw right through it. You saw right through him. You knew instantly he would never grow into a man or a father, something you were born knowing how to be.

Your eyes widened, a little angry, a little amused. “You’re a silly little girl,” they seemed to say. “Do you really think those cheap little rings could ever deter me.” You mocked me, but beneath it was something else. You cared. You cared in a way I had never experienced. You cared and loved like a man.

But you were more than I could handle then. I was twenty‑seven with two baby girls and a life I didn’t know how to leave. So I ran. I ran like a scared little bunny when I should have stayed and faced my fate.

The Universe, however, has a long memory. It took us by the hand four years later and made things right. I didn’t run then. I couldn’t. And you always knew. You never gave up. You never gave up. You never gave up.

And when I saw you again, my soul said it once more, with the same ancient certainty.

There you are. That’s the one.