An elderly Afghan couple sit in wait for their flight out of Mazar e-Sharif

I sit on another flight, heading to the same place. I think. to myself, it’s just the same as this one; a place and time in my life without you. Lost in time, I’m plagued by the hunting of you. In time I have followed you here, in life you followed me since before i met you. To have met you here, all that time ago, I don’t think we would have known each other. It took the right place, and just the right distance to travel, the right parts to heal and the broken pieces to fall just so before we would be the right time for each other. Yet my heart aches so for you in a time when I knew you not.
“What about before that?” cries my heart. “And before that? There was a place and time in my life when I needed you and you were not there!” But that’s not true, or not all of it anyway. Yes, I pined for you. I wrote about you before I knew you existed. But we weren’t right for each other just then.

I sat in a coffee shop in the busy, aspiringly affluent, social scene of Pretoria’s downtown Sunnyside mall. I had just ordered another espresso and was wondering if the giant-sized chess game being played out on the lower level was actually getting anywhere, when I was suddenly awash with the longing of you. I picked up my scrapbook tried to explain, ne,  rationalize, describe, the thought of you. I held you clearly in my heart I felt I knew you then, as I know you now. Without meeting you, I tried to articulate (or at least the written version thereof) what I saw in my heart. Of course I got it mostly wrong. How could I possibly know you. What I did know, I recognize now, is the space in my life, the hole you were meant to fill. Thoughts, no matter how imaginative, can not capture the essence of you, for then, as now, it is in my heart that you lived. As clearly as I saw the space of you, I wonder now if we would have seen each other.

Now the dusty earth of this forgotten country slides away below me now, and like the mist,  the guilt of not having been there for you when you searched for me burns away too. In its stead I’m left with the empty longing for time to move more quickly than it does. For our time, again and again, comes. Soon to be eternally.