Part four: a Cancun Love Story (guest post)

If you are a fan of love stories, you’re in for a treat today! Today’s guest blogger has appeared at My Pixie Blog before (click here for parts one, two, and three!), to discuss a beautiful and sweet romantic encounter he had in Cancun while vacationing. Today, he wraps up the story and I’m kind of sad to see it end. But I’m also happy for the outcome, in a strange way. I dunno. Love brings up so many emotions. Pull up a seat, grab a cup of coffee, and enjoy 🙂 

***

I realized just tonight that I’d never returned here to tell you final chapter.

Sorry about that. Life moves fast, and even when the bottom falls out, what do we do? We move on. I will tell you that even after this final chapter played out, there’s been nothing else like it. Not even close. A few almost – but nothing like this, and nothing like Eliza.

I should also tell you I’ve deleted the photos of us together – not angrily, but for self-preservation – but I kept the bowl. It’s packed up in a box in a dark garage. I’d like to bring it out. It’s beautiful and it’s done no wrong. Neither has Eliza for that matter.

She just fell in love with someone else.

Surprisingly – or maybe not, knowing Eliza – she’s not on social media. Although I’d love to see her Instagram feed, watch the world through her eyes and recognize again her perspective. Her Twitter feed would ba riot of the unexplained and soft landing place for her beautiful words.

The text that explained her second, more prolonged bout of silence hit me one afternoon at work. I deleted it too, and probably, this time, perhaps a bit angrily. In it, she thanked me for my season in her life and informed me that she had married a man she met a month ago.

Thank you for opening my heart again she wrote, and I should have felt grateful, I know. At first, I just didn’t. How in the world? I mean, even by my standards, this was a helluva twist to the final chapter of another failed romance.

I hope someone’s told you the news one of her sisters messaged me on Facebook. She had said she wished for her own Alonso in Cancun, as if we were available by drop shipment (free shipping to Prime customers.)

(A Mexican waiter flirted with her, she said, but that was as close as she got.)

Her other sister offered few details about the man who now was her brother-in-law.

We told her to go to North Carolina, she wrote. What’s keeping you here? I’ll never know how seriously Eliza took that advice, if she’d ever priced flights or bus rides or researched the pollen count in the Carolina piedmont on your average spring day.

Lots has happened since. Jobs lost, and found. Numbers given to me, scribbled on my palm or the back of a receipt or even on a sticky-note with a list of household chores on one side. There’ve been beautiful woman who say, we need to stay in touch …

There’ve been a couple of stalkers, even, and crushes on bosses and girls too young and women too married. I drew forth a fistful of crumpled papers, torn corners of stationary and business cards, all of pretty faces and beautiful smiles, from my bag recently.

They’re given me in moments I see romance where no romance is.

It feels like I’ve lived a million romances since, each, though, a subtle rumble when compared to the way the earth shook with Eliza. And perhaps it isn’t that the romance the universe chooses to throw at me is subpar …

Maybe I’ve just been driven to a higher standard.

So many times since Eliza’s plunge into the married abyss, I’ve hoped for a spark like hers. From a cashier. From a co-worker. From the woman behind me in traffic. Hi, sweet one. Look in your mirror. It’s me. But she never looks. Well, usually.

I pulled next to a mom in a minivan. She wore her sweet blond hair in a bob and peered and smiled behind her seat to a child buckled behind her through black rimmed glasses. She was both elegant and unsure, adorable and clueless as to how much. She waved at me.

I grabbed a Sharpie and a notebook and noting her wedding ring I scribbled (neatly) this:

She covered her mouth and smiled. I accelerated much harsher than I should have in a Hyundai, satisfied (more like hopeful) I’d added to her already stellar morning. I didn’t want to see her again, only to remember her reaction.

I wasn’t sure how this final chapter would read. It’s been a while. Would I feel like the other finalist on that last Bachelorette episode, where they talk it out but stay friends? I wonder if Eliza has had kids and if that day in Cancun and those weeks afterward pop up in her beautiful mind.

With every contact rekindled or pretty mom ahead of me in the grocery line buying wine and telling me about her rough day, there’s both hope and resignation. The room for a spark but also the reality that women like Eliza come round as common as comets.

Which is enough to keep weary eyes forever forward. And upward.