One reunion. Two fools.

Removing her coat, she stood looking, taking in the comforting familiarity of the scene, where she would stand against a tree and talk to him for hours. It had been almost eighteen years since they met; small-talk masking and holding at bay the pain of leaving, tears blocking her view as she watched him go. She had been unable to come to terms with the parting, slipping into a shunning silence when words had failed. Many times in these years they had talked, their talks stretched into an endless nowhere; about career, about life, descriptive as though to a child, willing away conflict, the reality, the procession of time.

She picked up her bag and went closer to the tree; crisp brown leaves pirouetted into the corners of the path that led to the tree, the smell of the dried leaves, and the smell of time, the surrounding ground, weed-strewn and poignantly empty. She stopped for a moment, trance-like, and it was all still there, the long gone afternoons on the laboratory steps, still somehow alive, the lazy smell of the coal fire, the songs, the squirrels, the wondrous stories, all echoing down the years, drifting memories, easing her back to a time, before the harsh reality of life had struck, back to those good olde days.

She remembered nothing distinct of the years between them, the years were blurred, like a streak of speed. She was going to meet him today, and here. “This is how things should be”, she thought, “It will be as difficult for him as it is for me”. She laughed contemptuously and easily.

Over the years, she had often thought, suddenly, that there was a word that expressed what she felt for him, but she could not recall it. She, unsuccessfully, groped for a word that hung in her mind as an empty shape. She could neither fill it nor dismiss it.

She walked around the place, and suddenly glanced back at the tree. The tree, in its immovable finality, told her what he meant to her. She winced. She desperately, for this moment, hoped she could tear apart time and re-sew. In the metal tin can, that lay abandoned on the ground, she saw on her face, a faint smile of a lost battle, a battle deliberately lost..

And then he came. She need not have seen herself in the tin can...