Chapter 2

The Café
We sat in the café.
Not only was there a table between us. There were years.
The table stood in front of both of us, separating us from each other. But perhaps it was also separating the past from the present.
It was symbolic.
Were we going back to the past, or were we going toward the future?
How many times had I imagined this day in my mind?
He looked at me.
“Why do you still think about me?” he asked.
I had thought about this question for days.
Finally, I knew the answer.
“You are my youth.”
I understood it now.
He wasn't my love anymore. He wasn't the dream man I had imagined for years. He wasn't even the dream I had carried with me for so long.
He was my youth.
I hadn't seen him for years, but in my mind he was still twenty-seven years old.
And I was still fifteen.
A schoolgirl.
That was when we first met.
I looked at him.
“Why didn't you marry me?” I asked.
Behind those words were all the years when I had imagined it would happen someday.
He smiled.
Then he asked:
“Why didn't you come back when you could?”
Neither of us had an answer.
Perhaps there had been many opportunities. Perhaps there had been only one. Perhaps we simply didn't recognize it when it was there.
And now it was too late for both of us to make that dream happen.
We both knew it.
And still, when we met again, we smiled.
I remembered going to his parents' house many times as a family friend.
He came to see me at work.
I knew he came to see me.
He knew I liked him, at least a little.
But neither of us took the next step.
Neither of us changed the direction of the road.
Once, I wrote a poem with the words:
Young friend, don't let the person you love walk away, because in your mind, he will always be coming back.
And now we were sitting in an imaginary café, across from each other.
In the beginning, I thought about him a lot.
I wondered where he was, what he was doing, what his life had become.
But now I don't want to ask anything.
I only want to look at him.
His face is beginning to fade.
And strangely, as his face fades, it brings me closer to my youth.
I look at him and see the boy I remember.
Not the man sitting across from me.
The years disappear.
The café disappears.
The table disappears.
There is only that young man again.
And me—the fifteen-year-old girl who didn't know yet how quickly youth could disappear.
I reach toward him.
“I touch your shoulder,” I say softly. “Look in front of you.”