A few weeks ago or a month ago or something like that, well, twenty years ago I was maybe in love once, and she wanted kids and I wanted to make paintings so we both left to go do that.  But the sex was amazing, not to bring it down to the least common denominator, sex, but this was the kind of sex that went to the core of your existence, a night in bed with this woman was like forty years of psychotherapy - if you were so fucked up you went three times a week.  It was the kind of intense that was dangerous and self-destructive and she wanted kids and I wanted to paint but really I walked away from it because had I not we would have just annihilated ourselves in a bout of spontaneous combustion, and nothing would have remained, nothing.  

It took years to shake her, in a way you never really do, and in there somewhere we both moved, from NY to LA, and then we ran into each other again in LA in a few very funny, very ill-timed and infamous episodes, the kind that included other spouses, and finally we no longer ran into each other and years passed.

I tracked her down a few years ago, and we exchanged, each, a brief email of update.  She was with the same husband, had a kid now, like that.

A few weeks ago, or a month ago or something like that, she tracked me down.  I kept her company through her divorce.  She called me every day and I didn't lie about who I was or how it all turned out. We talked about how intense our relationship was and how we still had it for each other and the calls were quiet, intimate.  Not phone-sex intimate, no, the kind you get when you really talk to someone.

It was nice, and for a while there I felt normal, like a normal guy who was normal and could do this, talk to people. 

Of course she is, like most people, much more successful than I and lives in a nice house and has nice things and when she talks of them she refers to them as "expensive";  she refers to her expensive things. 

He moved out, and she redecorated and she loved her new sofa and I was still honest about who I was and how it all turned out and she decided to get a puppy and was calling me less and less.  I got an email from her that they got the puppy, and then I didn't hear from her again.

I slept last night, for the first time in a few weeks or a month, something like that, last night I slept deeply and soundly and well and I woke up today and stood in my good friend silence and looked at the painting I just started and thought, christ, it's good to be home.