I had fallen madly in love with her as a 16 year old and wildly, almost unbelievably, she loved me back.

By the time we were 18 I felt closer to her than anyone in my life. In any other era, I would have married her. But in the 1990s United States, I instead left to attend Prestigious University, many hours away.

By Thanksgiving we had broken up. We kept in touch here and there throughout undergrad. (She attended some pretend college to major in French. I chased status and sluts.)

At one point her parents were divorcing and she prepared and mailed me some perfumed box. It contained a candle ("light this when life is dark..."), letters she had written me, a mix tape cassette, trinkets from high school (the cross she wore around her neck that we joked about when I would fondle her teenage tits), printed out Kodak photographs of us smiling at the lake, sitting on the hood of her Grand Wagoneer, etc. She wrote some cover letter about how distraught she was over the divorce, how alone she felt, was love real, where was God, where was her life going.

I shoved the whole thing in a closet.

By graduation from undergrad, I wanted her back. I had gotten arrested, was drinking a real lot, my soul was broken, I hated everything about the prestigious college, etc. I tried to simply waltz back into the old relationship. Lol. She rejected me. I did not handle this "well", and at one point chainsawed a tree on her family's farm that we first had sex under. She got "scared" of me, and cut off all contact.

I am so old that this was largely pre-internet. So cutting off contact really meant complete disappearance. By the time the internet did arrive, I was already blocked there as well.

Decades passed.

I was home for a reunion of sorts, and this past Saturday she walked down the path just in front of me.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5899437&forum_id=2]#50107131)