Barely Twenty

"What do you remember about Ireland?"

I tap a finger against the top of my steaming coffee cup, sitting across from the past I could never seem to forget.

"I remember everything," I answer. "I remember meeting eyes with you for the first time. I remember laughing and sharing a beer in every single pub in Dublin. I remember running up the hills so fast, I swear we could have flown at any moment."

"But when you think about Ireland," Sean says. "That's not what you think of."

He still looks the same to me; green eyes so piercing they can warm your skin with just one glance, brown scruff on his cheeks from lack of a good shave, large arms strong enough to lift my entire body and carry me down the shores of the beach. After all these years, he is still the nineteen year old boy I fell in love with in a foreign country. And sitting across from him, I am still the nineteen year old girl who dropped out of college to travel through Europe.

"You're right," I sigh. "When I think of Ireland, I think of the gloomy look on your face when I said I had to go home. I think about saying goodbye to you at the airport. I think about being barely twenty years old and leaving the first guy I'd ever loved."

"So why did you?"

"I’ll never really know," I mumble.

I have spent the last twenty five years in America, wishing I had never fled the hills of Ireland. I have woken up every day, alone and longing for a man who was over 3, 000 miles away. One might call me pathetic, and maybe that's true. But in all these years, I have never met anyone like Sean, who could love me unconditionally and teach me as much as I teach him.

He leans back in his chair and attempts to smile. We sit a couple feet apart, but we are still an ocean away from each other. Our love couldn't work when we were nineteen, and we both know that it probably won't work now.

But I'll always remember the boy from Ireland who taught me how properly drink a pint, who held my hand as we cliff jumped into the ocean, who traveled to America many years later just to see my face.

"What do you remember about Ireland?" I ask, turning his original question around on him, even though I am asking him about his own home.

"I remember seeing the most beautiful girl in the world and knowing I had to have her, even if it meant jumbling my words when I spoke to her for the first time."

I giggle, recalling the memory. "But," I say. "That's not what you think of when you think of Ireland."

"No," he confirms. "When I think of Ireland, I think of making the biggest mistake of my life and letting that girl go."

"But it wouldn't have worked," I remind him.

He shrugs. "I would have fixed it."