Reunion

The girl in the café had been stretching her latte for the last fifteen minutes. Wearing just jeans, a T-shirt and a light jacket, she wasn’t dressed warmly enough for the winter cold, and the way she wrapped her hands around the tepid cup showed she felt the chill, even indoors. The look on her face was a lost one, and none of the people getting on with their lives around her seemed to notice or care.

I noticed, though, and I cared. There was nothing outwardly special about her; of average height and average build, brown-haired and brown-eyed, she was no different from any of a hundred girls I’d already seen for the day. But her sadness was singular. It permeated the air around her, drenching her in a sorrow that seemed to weigh more heavily upon her than any sorrow had ever weighed upon anyone I had ever seen. This was no teenager’s angst, no divorcee’s distress. This was surely the sort of melancholy of which Keats had written.

I watched as she listlessly stirred the last few drops of coffee that remained in the cup, and then drained them. She brushed a stray lock of hair behind one ear, and resumed her empty stare out the frosty window.

My attention was diverted momentarily by the faint click of the door, and I turned my head to see a man whose face had obviously been ravaged by a grief as great as this girl’s. He was older, perhaps in his forties or fifties, with greying dark hair and deep lines carved into his face. He was haggard and worn, as if he had fallen too hard and come too far, and inwardly I winced in sympathy for them both.

But then a truly extraordinary thing happened. By some miracle of fate, perhaps, the girl turned her lonely eyes from the window, and they locked onto the stranger at the door with a fierceness and an intensity that shocked me. Her eyes flashed with what might have been anything in the world, and her lips parted as though she were lost for words that desperately needed to be said.

The man, for his part, returned her stare with every iota of barely restrained emotion. He didn’t move, and his face didn’t change, but his dark, haunted eyes burned. I could hardly look at him. Every moment seemed an eternity, like looking into those pools of anguish was a burden too great to bear.

The girl stood, and now her expression was completely different. I read fear and pain and endless longing, but great waves of relief were also washing over her face. Her lips trembled, and she began to move with what seemed frustrating slowness towards him.

I found I couldn’t tear my eyes away. I had nothing to do with any of this, but there was a deep ache in my chest from just watching this incredible thing about to happen.

The girl was walking normally now, halfway across the café. I waited with bated breath. One solitary tear glistened on her cheek, and the setting sun fired it as red as blood. She broke into a run, and the man took a single step forward to meet her as she hurled herself into his arms.

How those two held each other I may never be able to describe. Limbs intertwined, their bodies pressed so tightly it seemed the two merged into one. And whether the tears they shed were of joy or sorrow, I doubt either could have said.

I thought they would never part, and in truth, I didn’t want them to. I was perfectly content to stay enraptured in the sudden and surprising warmth that seemed to spread from the spot where they stood embracing. In all the English language there is only one word to describe what I know they felt. Relief and happiness are good words, but they are overshadowed sadly by the simple and succinct word ‘love’. And their love was so great it enveloped not just the room, not just the café, not just that suburb of London, but the whole world.

And I was watching when they kissed, the kiss to shame all kisses that I shall not even attempt to depict. When they finally separated, they stood there for a moment, just gazing at each other, each basking in the glow of the other’s presence and all-encompassing love, and then she took his hand and gently led him back to the table where she had been sitting. And they turned their chairs at right angles to each other, and just sat there without saying a word.

When the words finally came they were slow and halting, and so soft I could not hear them. But how could words matter after what had just been shared? Silence fell often between them and did not bother them, and I could only sit there with a smile on my face. Sometimes they spoke, sometimes they only looked, and while he was almost old and she was almost ordinary, the way they looked at each other was enough to make everyone else uncomfortable, because it was so obvious that she was the only person in the room for him, and he the only thing she saw.

I don’t know what circumstances brought those two together, nor what may have driven them apart, but I do know this: no matter what it was that tore them asunder, it could never have been as strong at that which holds them together still. For this is the tenth year, and they are still as one. Each year on the anniversary of that astonishing reunion, the memory of which still makes me smile, they come to this old café together and sip their lattes and sit in seldom broken silence. Sometimes they speak, and sometimes they don’t, but always there is the look. He is greyer and more lined and she is only thirty, and often people stare and criticize where they have no right, but I think the two little ones with them speak volumes for the sheer consuming power of pure, enduring love.