Come to me

I was jolted awake as the wheels hit the tarmac. The sun was shining in though the sliver of the airplane window blind. I slide the blind up and squinted through the sunlight to take a look at the city I hadn’t seen in nearly a decade.

She lived north of the city and it would take me another 4 hours to drive to her. I felt a lump form in my chest. Would she even want to see me? Would she recognize me? Sure, I could have found her number and called before making the 22 hour journey home, but the years away and the the lifetime of untold experiences would make for an even more awkward phone call.

I had made my decision and she had made hers. Any regrets either one of us might feel at this point were hopefully just water under the bridge.

She was an artist. Her paintings and collages had garnered international attention. Even in the deep desert backwaters of the Australian outback where I’d worked for the last 9 years, I’d occasionally see her distinctive artwork on a t-shirt or a gift card. A nature conservancy group used her artwork for their logo, or I’d see her interviewed in a magazine or catch her art hanging on a wall in a tv show.

It was hard enough to forget her, but her art added a colorful reminder of what we once shared.

One day about 6 months ago when I drove in to the city for supplies and tools to replace a broken pump, I was walking past an art gallery and out of the corner of me eye I saw her.

Well, not her exactly, but her paintings.

The gallery I stumbled upon was featuring her artwork and it caught my attention like a flash of lightning. I stopped in my tracks and stared in through the window. The landscape was unmistakable. It was a painting of the view from her back porch, overlooking the creek and the mighty Cedar she had named Persephone. A Barn Owl perched on one the lower branches and stared back at me, daring me to look away. I hadn’t seen this piece before, but it was unmistakably her.

It happened automatically, I found myself opening the gallery door and walking in, dumbfounded and stunned from the flood of memories and emotions the painting sent cascading through my synapses. I turned and stood in front of one her most famous prints, “Wildflowers”, and took it all in. There was an inner light that emanated from her work that couldn’t really be explained by the simple use of paint. Her style, like her, was unmistakably full of life.

I turned to look at the next painting, another I hadn’t seen before. A woman’s form reclining underneath a sea of stars. It felt both lonely and content, like an acceptance of our uniqueness and the reality of our impermanence all rolled in to a single image. A supple form surrounded by midnight blue sky and Milky Way slowly sparkling overhead. Tranquil grace spilled from her paintbrush and into my eyes.

A woman from the gallery sidled up beside me and spoke softly. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” I muttered something unintelligible underneath my breath.

I was still too stunned from both the coincidence of coming across her work and the ensuing flood of emotions to wrap my mind around what it was I was feeling. I cleared my throat and whispered: “absolutely.” I felt tears well up in my eyes and turned away from the woman to look at the next painting, more to avoid the awkwardness of sharing my emotional outpouring than anything else.

What happened next did very little to ease the churning inside of me. I was staring at myself. My eyes peered back at me from the painting in a look of recognition. I’m not sure what my own eyes were doing, but my jaw dropped open as I muttered another unintelligible mishmash of syllables.

The woman from the gallery turned to me and gasped.

“Oh my goodness, that’s you!” she bubbled excitedly.

It was indeed. I recognized where the source of the painting came from. It was from a photo she had taken of me maybe 15 years ago. It was another moment in time that neither one of us would ever forget. We had gone to our local park to walk her dog Esther, and she wanted to take a photo with the light of the sunset behind me.

Right as she was snapping the shutter of her 35mm camera and the light of the flash temporarily blinded me, a Hummingbird somehow confused my forehead for a flower and photobombed the image. She blew up the photo and framed it, hanging it over the fireplace mantle in her peaceful forest home.

The light of surprise on my face from the whir of the hummingbird in the painting surely was no match for the surprise on my face as I stood there in open jawed shock.

Flooded with a hundred memories of our relationship and its subsequent dissolution, emotions and images coalesced into near overwhelm. Love, loss, regret, joy, laughter, grief, bittersweet longing. The tears in my eyes made it a little difficult to read the placard below the painting, but after a second or two the words written there rang silently through my mind:

“Come to me.” the title read.

I whispered thank you to the woman from the gallery and sort of shuffle stumbled out the door, unsure of where I was going or how I would get there. I ran my errands in a sort of stunned silence. Not really paying attention to anything more than the beating of my heart and the whirling chaos in my mind. I arrived home several hours later, took a shower and laid down to sleep, which took a lot longer than normal.

She came to me in my dreams that night. She didn’t speak a sound, but her smiling eyes as she stood under the big Cedar in her backyard told me all I needed to know.

“Come to me.”

It took me a few months to make the arrangements for my departure. I pride myself in being a responsible employee and wanted to make sure the facility had a solid replacement before I left. I wanted to write to her and did begin several letters, but tore up each one when I realized no words would adequately explain the feelings, the memories and connection we tried to sweep under the rug of time.

I had felt regret before, but nothing quite described how my decision to choose making money over her love had haunted my psyche. We didn’t speak on the evening before I left for work in Australia. She packed my bags pre flight and slept at her best friends house. I could hear her crying as she closed the door to leave.

We still sent each other birthday cards and holiday gifts, but we never discussed the pain or regret of our breakup once I got on that plane and flew away.

The ghosts of her memory sometimes made me feel like a fool. I had continued to follow her career and knew she hadn’t married. Yet even now I wondered if she had actually forgiven my decision to leave, or were the ghosts of loss and longing still haunting her heart just as regret had so often haunted mine.

Now here I was, pulling into the winding driveway of her forest home, wondering if I’d made a mistake. Perhaps I had been presumptuous in my interpretation of the title of her painting.

“Come to me”

Feeling a potent mixture of anxiety and excitement, trepidation and longing, I could feel myself holding my breath as I pulled the car to a stop. I took a deep breath and blew deeply through an unedited sigh.

I could hear the creek burbling as I turned the car off. I could see the light pouring through her kitchen window as the sun set behind the trees in the distance. Her garden is in full bloom and I can smell the delicate waft of jasmine as well as hear the sound of Mark Knopfler’s guitar and voice coming from the inside of the house.

“Some day baby when the river runs free, it’s going to carry that water of love to me.”

This just might be the perfect entrance music, I thought to myself.

I knocked three times on the door and waited. A dog barked on the other side of the door as it swung open. She looked at me with a curious smile and it took another 3 or 4 seconds before dawning recognition crossed her face. The smile in her eyes didn’t change even as the one around her mouth shifted to one of surprise. We stood there for what felt like frozen minutes, but it was maybe 10 seconds before either one of us moved or uttered a sound.

My heart finally relaxed a bit as she rushed forward and threw her arms around me. I could hear the familiar and unmistakable sound of her gentle sobs as we embraced for the first time in nearly a decade.

Eventually she pulled her tear strewn face back to look at me, but we didn’t let each other go. I brushed a strand of her autumn colored hair from her forehead and drank in the sight of her. Slowly, perhaps even a little awkwardly, but still containing the grace of a summer breeze, she brought her lips closer to mine, sealing the decade of longing we both felt behind the doors of forgiveness and re-membrance.

“You’re home” she whispered through our kiss.