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I want to fall in love one day.  To feel loved and to experience the feeling of loving someone.

I have loved someone from a distance now and I have allowed myself to cage those feelings, only to speak of them once face-to-face and to write of them once in a late-night email, with a response that was tenderly written. Yet, a great canyon of silence has grown between us since then.  I have searched for a bridge to cross over, but any that existed I fear he might have burned.  Why?  I don't fit some vision, or he is afraid of hurting me, someone he cares about, or I am too honest for his tender and scuffed up heart.  I have no answers that truthfully tell that story.  Only he could explain.  And he isn't going to, and I am not going to ask. I have waited.  I've not pursued anyone because I knew that I was not ready, what with all my searching and hoping. But I've finally packed my car and driven away from the canyon. It echoes the car's wheels rolling on gravel, dust rising, and no one there to say goodbye.  Farewell, friend.

And so the tide has come around, the wind is blowing across the lake, my paddle skims the water, and I see the reeds swaying with a late summer hope of what is possible, what is to come, what autumn might bring.

The screen door bangs with the coming autumn wind.  Wildflowers lean toward the rising sun and sway as it travels to sunset. I've opened the windows.  I want to fall in love again.