It's strange... to walk into a regular, busy, crowded coffee shop and see your first -well, your first everything- sitting there, all nonchalantly at a table. These reunions, these moments, are things you think about for so long, things you spend your time wondering about while you're away. And then when they happen, they are just entirely surreal. Climactic simply because they are so anti-climactic. All you do is walk into a coffee shop and see that person. No billowing music, no surprises, no kind lighting. Just walking in and sitting down across from them.
It's stranger... to sit across from that person and look at a face that is still the same, but isn't. A face that is two years older and about ten years wiser. A face that has changed while you weren't around to see it. But a face that you still know as well as your own, even though you haven't traced it in years.
It's stranger still... to realize how much everything has changed. To wonder aloud together what things would have been like "if only". If only one had stayed, if only the bad things hadn't happened, if only we had been older, if only. You sit together, recounting everything that has happened, justifying why you both have changed. You both have made bad decisions. You've both made a couple good ones too. You both judge each other, even though neither of you is in any position to do so. You've both grown up, just in different ways and into different people. It is simply different, and that is simply just the way it is.
But maybe the most strange of all... is to know that with all the differences and similarities, all the changes and all the continuous things....you're still two people that are important to each other. That it doesn't really matter what you have done or what has happened or what could have happened. It doesn't really matter how things "should" be now, or how they "could" be now, and in truth, it doesn't really matter how things are now. It is still the two of you.
So maybe that is strange... to think about that. But it's also comforting. To know that there are relationships that are not dependent on a specific time or place. To know that some things will always matter. To know that things don't have to be the same, that feelings don't have to be the same, but that it can still be alright. To know that through all of it, you can still sit down and have a cup of coffee together. You can still talk. You can still care. And you can still make sense to each other, you can still make sense in that cafe, you can still make sense in life.
The important people will always be the important people, no matter how long it has been and no matter how far we have gone in between. Because anything that involved real emotion, anything that involved a momentary entwining of paths or whatever other less poetic way you describe it, is not temporal. It lasts, and it matters.
"If we overcome space, then all we have left is here. If we overcome time, then all we have left is now. And in the middle of here and now, don't you think we'll see each other once or twice?"
-from "Jonathan Livingstone Seagull"
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