I was worried, I was scared, reverted back to an adolescent state of mind and told myself that I was a different person, that recreating the past was simply impossible. I had made the drive innumerable times--I-91 north for 36 miles and I-84 east for another 17. Still, I could not shed the lingering fear that I was different now, somehow less kind, less caring, lost my child-like self along the way.

I had thought of you, of this moment, in the spaces between my absence. I had dreamt of you and saying "at last" and told myself that all of the waiting would soon subside. But still, I wondered if I had been replaced along the way, a faceless figure sleeping on my side of our shared bed. I feared that my forget-me-not's had been lost, my scattered bobby pins kicked beneath your bed and traces of shed hair swept away long ago.

And then suddenly the drive was over and I was there, on the other side of your apartment door. Everything still smelled the same, of old books and paint, and you sat there on the couch flicking through channels the way that you do.

At once, you were no longer a pixelated figure that I held close on my phone. You were there, waiting for me, alive and breathing and warm and whole. My god, it was as if I had never waited for something as long as I had waited for you.

We didn't talk about how my hair had grown longer or how you had grown a mustache while I was away. You still wore your t-shirt splattered with china white paint and I still laughed the same. Had it been snowing outside it would be as if I had never left.

Almost midnight and the moon made your skin a shade of starry blue. You were tired, eyes half closed, and I was still laughing in my childlike way. I felt the blush of your skin in the palm of my hand and traced your outline until it became late and you appeared as a mountain-like silhouette, asleep on your side. Still, I wondered if you did not believe in the entity of love.

David Viscott said, "To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides." Finally, I understood. It was heat and warmth--far beyond sex. It was holding a lover's nervous hand and blushing the way that you had imaged you would when you kept your eyes closed. It was fits of laughter and fits of rage and waiting, waiting, waiting, until you were at your lover's doorstep with shaky hands. To feel the sun from both sides meant to melt the remnants of winter's curse and feel the flush of spring's revival; to feel, to love, to understand, at last.