Anyways, I watched his speech on education and how he'd like to see it transform in the future. At the end, he recounted some work he was doing in the Himalayas; he was in a village that sat at about 13,000 feet above sea level and he told an 8-year-old girl that he wanted to give computers to every child in the world, then he paused, mid-sentence, to take a picture of her. She held her hand out to him and said:
"Nick," she nudged him gently, but to no avail. "Nick, are you listening to me?!" She said with a more commanding tone and a slight shove that forced his hand to balance on the bench they were sitting on.
He caught himself in one of those stupors that is set in motion by an unraveling chain of thought, and when he finally blinked at her intrusion he realized that his eyes were as thirsty as his brain. He hated that chirping voice.
He turned to look at her and acknowledge what she was saying, but her words weren't coming through. She was no more stimulating to him than a Greta Garbo film, no matter how good critics said they were. All that was needed to complete the scene was a black and white filter set over the sun.
She was beautiful nonetheless, he could not escape that. Her hair was a dark brown that faded ombre style into some washed out shade of blonde; it was a popular style of the time that all the movie stars sported on their red carpet gaits.
The color of her eyes was as confused as the stare they were giving him now. They shifted maniacally from hazel to evergreen in the drooping afternoon sunlight. Her natural red lips moved in step with her gaze, bouncing gracefully through her words of admonishment. The colors of her features were set perfectly against the backdrop of her summer tanned skin that October had just begun to fade.
"I can hear you," Nick told her.
A strong, cool burst of wind marched through the tall elms, rattling lose the first layer of leaves that fall would hold ransom.
As he took to his feet after suggesting they take a walk another powerful gust of air ebbed and cracked a dead limb that had been looming over their heads, and with the help of gravity it struck Nick with such a force that two of his ribs let open a hole in his right lung that quickly filled with life and just as quickly took his.
He died with a gasp of panic, knowing that among all of his accomplishments, he was about to lose the only battle he had ever wished to see through.
That was a Sunday and his funeral, which hundreds of his colleagues, friends, and admirers had attended, was held that Wednesday. Regina sat in the last pew on the aisle, closest to the door.
His wife gave his eulogy through forced sobs and garbled prose, but Regina could only hear the chirps of common sparrows that so loved the elms; she never once took her eyes off his open casket.
It had only been a few days since they spoke, and it had only been by chance. Before then, nearly twenty years had passed, the day he unveiled the face of his love for her.
As children, they had been fellow students and neighbors in a time well before the digital excesses of the approaching future. When homes were privileged to have telephones without chords, so that a private conversation was simply a possibility, instead of a certainty.
He knew her with his eyes, and she would come to know him only through his words, for she never dared glance in his direction save to acknowledge his gaze. For years he would see her; from his window leaving with friends to revel in the nightlife of their humble city; passing through the corridors of their school building; laughing with friends in the popular places that only the recognizable crowd had any stature.
Though he would experience hurried love with beautiful women throughout the rest of his life, Nick knew that there was only one that even time was forced to pause and have a look at.
Her perfectly rolled lips gave way to a diaphanous smile with two expertly sculpted rows of white teeth. The bridge of her nose set her chestnut eyes apart at a golden ratio, the same symmetry that outlined her subtle jaw, and that nature so conveniently chose for her best designs. She always wore her dark hair in a pony-tail, leaving its true length and weight for the tried and trusted.
She faintly noticed him from time to time. He had learned at a younger age that if he was selfish with his admiration she would quickly discover him and find avenues of avoidance. So, as they grew older, he learned to reproach his wandering goggles and take sips of her beauty instead of gulps.
The school days had passed and Nick, being the studious outsider that he was, graduated at the top of his class and headed out for a promising career in medicine. He would go on to develop vaccines for various cancers and diseases and build for himself an acknowledgment that was renowned around the globe.
She would go on to start her energy consulting firm that she would command with as much confidence as she carried through her school days. That command would blossom as she would become the woman that she always envisioned, but she would soon long for something much harder to procure as she would realize she let it slip away with a simple piece of paper.
He started the letter of his expressions the day she moved into the house across the street from his mother's and he handed it to her, half tarnished from the sweat of his palm, on the day of their graduation.
She reluctantly accepted the letter as her friends giggled and pointed at the poor boy who was shaking in her presence and sweating from every pore. It hadn't come as much of a surprise to her. The boy's furtive glances had always been known to her and it was only a matter of time in her mind before those beautiful sips that Nick had been taking all of those years would eventually empty the glass and need to be refilled.
In a hasty but calculated response she shooed him away like a stray scavenging for coins on the shopping avenues of the city as she silently slipped the piece of his soul that he had so patiently composed into the pocket of her frock.
"That poor, poor boy."
Years would pass and she would wrestle many battles with fruitless love, but none could compare to the words so painstakingly chosen to confess his. Their professional lives would criss cross many times, like the freight lines through Chicago, the crossroads of the world. Until one day when she was forced to acknowledge the reason for his tremulous perspiration.
They both unwittingly frequented the same cafe that met half way between their places of duty. two rows of tables accompanied by two chairs lined the arcade of the spanish style diner. In the early Spring months, when the air was still cool and damp from the renewing rains, warm air would tip toe through the arcade forcing the sensation of the times to come.
They had been situated at separate tables, facing each other. The years of astute labor had ashed his hair and he wore his age with young vigor, for the girl he had always admired was occasionally a few steps away.
As if time had been standing still since the day he first saw her carrying boxes of girlish knick-knacks across the tree budded terrace of her new home, and she noticed the solemn boy furtively sticking his nose over his window sill with the faint hopes of catching the scent of her hair. Here they were, in the Spring time arcade of the cafe, his same clandestine glance over his newspaper and her ever keen eyes on him.
She moved to address him. Like a fish clasped from the water he gulped for air that could not fill his lungs enough and he began to turn blue.
"Many years have passed," she said to him without any proper greeting. "And you have never once asked me what I thought of your letter."
This simple piece of truth struck him so abruptly that the air he had so barrenly been searching for was knocked from his chest. Only once more in his life would he know the feeling of grasping for air, only to have it rush from him in a blind instant.
He had been involved in an unhappy marriage with a woman who did not love him. On the day that Regina Reyes approached him in the air conditioned arcade he realized he could step down from the shelf that held his beloved and admired achievements and he would leave his wife in six months time to marry the woman he had always loved.
The summer had passed and their wild rendezvous were as unsuspected as solitary cats among the acacias in the open savannah. Even the sun envied the radiation created by their naked promiscuity in the many open air balcony of the many lofts he traveled her to. His wealth and prestige allotted him no shortage of secret hideaways for them.
As she wept quietly alone in the back of the church, she realized that it was not him she was crying for, but the missed opportunities of so many years that had been left behind. And she learned that day that some things must be learned to live without, but love is never one of them.
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