I found her

I've been thinking about "the girl that got away" for many years. I wrote a love story about her called "Heat" that was published in Best Lesbian Love Stories. (I thought I was just writing another erotica story, but it turned out to be something more.) I have no idea if she ever shared my feelings. There was one night in my memory where it seems that something else could have happened, if I hadn't been so dense (and so drunk); that's what inspired the story. I don't know if my memory is even accurate or a fantasy I've created over the years. It didn't even dawn on me that I'd been in love with her until several months after I'd moved away, when I realized how intensely I missed her. (I was involved with a man at the time, we both were, and being bisexual wasn't something it occurred to me that I could act on. Seems silly now, but I was 21, and had only recently escaped my Fundie youth.)

We didn't part on the best of terms, and I think it was partly because I needed to invent a reason to break that bond with her, because I knew I was leaving town for good. She went back to the reservation she grew up on, and I moved 2,000 miles away to the big city.

But I've been unable to stop thinking of her for 20 years. Every six months or so I Google her, trying to find her. I came close a few times, but was always a few months behind her, finding the place she'd been, but no longer was.

Tonight something on t.v. reminded me of her, and I looked again...and there she was, on a reunion site. And there were other links, articles mentioning her name in local papers: an obituary for her father who recently died, her time in a recent marathon, a paper she'd written for the school on the reservation. It's like the universe finally stopped hiding her from me.

And now...well, I don't know what to do. If I contact her, 20 years of dreaming of her might crumble into an unpleasant reality that I imagined our connection so many years ago, that she thinks badly of me because of the way we parted, that she's as straight as an arrow, a homophobe, or dear goddess, a Republican. Whatever her response, I know we'd still be separated by more than the 2,500 miles that are between us. We talked about it once, how I had the "city" in my bones, and she had the quiet life, the reservation, in her blood.

I know. I'm being a coward.