Recent Facebook memories have me recalling the visit to Santa Fe in December, 2017, to see L. We had spent small amounts of time together the previous August, over four days, in Santa Fe, and then some killer amazing time together in St. Paul and Minneapolis the previous October, again crammed into a four day period. As soon as I returned to Arizona from Minnesota that autumn, we agreed we would arrange a visit in December, with her visiting family in Santa Fe. Her family visits were always already fraught, as she had a complex relationship with her mother, and a deeply cathected and complex relationship with her sister, whose experience of life is often difficult. Her approach to these family visits was to fly solo from Minnesota to NM with her two young children (2 and 5 at this time), and the three of them would stay in cramped quarters at her mother's relatively tiny house in a condominium subdivision in Santa Fe. By this visit, or, actually even by our first meeting the previous August, her mother and her sister knew of our affair, which I found odd, but I never had an open or honest relationship with any of my family members, really, since my family atmosphere was always so judgmental and back-stabby. Our affair had lived far more vitally in mediated space from July to December, 2017, with more than 75,000 Facebook messages exchanged during that time, plus phone calls, emails, texts. We told each other stories of an imaginary life together quite often, and many of those are lodged in my memory as if they happened. One of the advantages and pitfalls when two readers and writers connect. She had even imagined we had two children, in our parallel universe. "Sororal twins," she said. Ananka and Jeru. We were married, and traveled a lot, and went to museums, galleries, plays, movies, and concerts, and created a lively, artsy kind of bohemian imagined life, full of music, poetry, books, food, and passion. Of course there's no way to know if an actual life in reality would have been even remotely like the stories we told each other. In reality, we never spent more than about six hours together, we never even spent a night together. We never cooked, traveled, or did much of anything. Except we did go to a performance of Romeo and Juliet (perfect?), and we saw Ani Di Franco and Robyn Hitchcock, and we went out for dinner a couple times, and to Ten Thousand Waves (on this December visit of 2017, actually). Therefore, my memories are often confused, as I take fiction for reality and reality for fiction, and that's one of the attractions of trying to tell the story, since it has that ever-fascinating if cliched "story within a story within a story" dynamic, as well as the epistolary novel framework. Except, instead of epistles, Facebook messenger, texts, emails. Standouts from this visit include, on the positive side, the romantic little room at the hotel, with a fireplace that never got the kind of use I had hoped for, but was great anyway. Dinner at Sazon, an amazing alta cucina Mexican place, with a tab of $160 for the two of us. Followed by Ten Thousand Waves. I had wanted to do a *real date* kind of experience, so I set it up. It worked out beautifully, but it ended in the usual way, with the inevitable departure back to her actual life, and me alone in a hotel. There also was a sweet walk from a restaurant to the bank, which held some kind of bizarre thrall for both of us, perhaps entirely because of its plainness. Like, we were partners, walking from the restaurant to a bank. Like normal people. The visit also featured a little more time with her kids, including a trip for donuts and to a park, and I thought her kids were just awesome. I started fantasizing about having a role in their lives, of course. The visit also included a somewhat awkward meeting with L's mother. Afterward, L told me that her mother had said, "He reminds me of your father, if he had ever gotten his shit together." As was increasingly true on these visits, whether in Santa Fe or in the Twin Cities, a lot of my time was spent alone, including walking to the plaza for the incredible chile stew with chicken, Christmas, at the Plaza Cafe. Served with a Mexican hot chocolate. Finished off by tres leches cake. Since it was near the holidays, this visit was on the heavy and challenging side for L. Her family obligations were greater than she had imagined. Her mother's boyfriend started raising suspicions about why L was always leaving, and leaving her children with her mother. On a trip to get a birthday cake for her mom, she broke down crying and said that her mother's boyfriend had accused her of "whoring around town," and that it was true, she was a whore, and she was an awful person, etc. The two days or so of the visit previously, I had still been in that high, idealistic frame of mind. It's hard for me to explain, now, why moral or ethical reservations or guilt had not even been part of my inner life. But when she lost it around the attack from her mother's boyfriend, I realized suddenly that much of the strange tension between the two of us was caused by growing, gnawing, darkening doubt and guilt for L, regarding what we were doing. It's remarkable that this did not dawn on me until about five months into what we were doing. This could have been a real turning point in the situation, since it cast the cold light of reality quite clearly. That she was feeling like our affair, which I was idealizing, was "whoring around," crashed my idealism to the ground. It was one of those opportunities for me to say, "I don't want to be that man in your life, or the cause of this, and I don't want to be involved in a dark thing of any kind with you, so let's stop." What's interesting is that this did indeed occur, but only after I returned to Arizona, and had some time and space to reflect. We "broke up" between Christmas and New Year's, the first of several attempts to end the affair. (Obviously it didn't stick). One of the nights during this visit, she had had a huge family holiday party, and gotten a little drunk, unusual for her, and broke down sobbing, confessing to her aunt (with whom I had been friends for years) that she was madly in love with me and didn't know what to do. What's interesting about this phase of things is that her sister, her mother, and her aunt were all telling her to just leave her partner. Why not? He's not the right man for you. Find your happiness. This kind of love is rare; you should take the risk. I felt oddly comforted, knowing that her family was "on my side," so to speak. But here's a strange thing: I never said "Look, I really want this to materialize. I can't keep doing this. Can we at least make like a three or five year plan or something?" I never even asked her to leave her partner. I respected her process too much, and, honestly, I knew, deep down, she was never going to leave him. So it's very odd remembering and knowing this. This visit also marks the only time I ever proposed to anyone. Having been married twice, neither of those marriages really involved a formal proposal so to speak, of the linguistic phrase "will you marry me?" At least not that I recall uttering, myself. I did indeed ask L, "will you marry me?" Her response was, "Yes. If possible." This makes me laugh now, looking back. There are a ton of reasons why it makes me laugh. Hard to explain. Maybe, dear reader, you get exactly why. We had already talked about feeling like we were true husband and wife for each other, and how astonishing that was, since neither one of us held those sorts of "soulmate" or "destiny" views on how al of this works. We had fantasized about holding the wedding ceremony on the edge of the incredible Clo Mor cliffs in Scotland (her idea). We also had an expression that I think she had coined, which was "if to when magic." It was her idea that we would need some kind of "if to when magic" to make the transition into living a life together. Around the time of this visit, she had started saying "if. and if and if." Instead. The if's were accumulating, the when receding, and if to when magic seemed even less likely than it had previously. This visit was a deep existential turning point for both us, where the parallel universe of denial and idealism in which we imagined ourselves became increasingly shaky, and from this time on, we two lived under the constant shadow of when we would no longer be lovers, or perhaps even friends. Neither one of us would confess this awareness for several months, but it was ever-present. It gave all of our subsequent interactions an incredibly poignant and bittersweet context. With each interaction, even just an exchange of texts or emails, my intuition began to wonder, is this the last one? It's a weird way to live. I guess we might always be living in that context no matter what, but we try not to remember that. Because, we all know stories where a beloved goes out to the store and gets hit by a truck or whatever and that's that. Every time we see someone is the last time. Until next time, and then, until there is no next time. Again, only in retrospect, it's remarkable that we didn't succeed in "breaking up" until a year from this time. Almost exactly a year. Combined with my memories of this December visit in 2017, I also have the memories of December a year later. In 2018, on this date, I was supposed to go to Santa Fe again, to see L. This time, the two of us had gotten insanely bold, as the plan was to mix our time with each other into a trip she was making *with her partner*. I had reserved the same room at the same hotel. We had had a super fraught few months especially, with a strained series of visits (February, April, June, July, November, each one getting heavier and less clear, murkier and sadder, more challenging, more fraught, but always with everything unspoken, until November, when L broke up with me, but the next night we were back together, etc.). I had found out she was visiting Santa Fe only through a general Facebook post of hers, inviting Santa Fe friends to reach out for social time. I confronted her, and asked if she were going to spend any time with an old boyfriend of hers, with whom she was still friends. She said no, and added "I was secretly hoping to see you, but I've been afraid to ask." As was always the case with her, I instantly said yes, and made arrangements. Instantly. I didn't even think twice. I didn't stop to consider the weird logistics of her partner also being there. I didn't stop in any way. This was characteristic of me, regarding her. When she first mentioned she wanted to see me in July of 2017, on her August visit to her family, my instant reply was "yes, of course." She may well be the only person in my entire life for whom the instant reply has always been "yes, of course." It was basically my default setting with her. This visit absolutely would have occurred, except that my retina detached, and tore, and the gas injection meant I had to be face down for five days, and get surgery, and I could not change elevation from the 1200 feet of Tempe to to 7000 feet of Santa Fe, or I would be blind in my left eye for the rest of my life. My eye doctor was horrified when I asked him if I could drive to Santa Fe over the weekend. Luckily, I had exactly 4 hours after the first medical procedure to cancel the $1100 hotel room for free. So it was that, post eye surgery, on the winter solstice, 2018, L ended the affair, while I was face down and spending the entire holiday alone. It was terrible timing. The last text she sent in the exchange when she broke up with me was "Stay cozy." I will always remember how hilarious and sad that is. How cold and weird. She had said, "I lack the psychic resilience to keep doing this." I get it. She was in her home town, surrounded by family, with her partner and the father of her children there, around Christmas, and I was going through a medical crisis and had to cancel my visit. I grew increasingly jealous and convinced she was actually fucking someone *else* while on that visit. One of the weird dimensions of this whole experience for me that I hadn't experienced in decades previously: extremely possessive sexual jealousy that was paranoid and not even based on any evidence. I was appalled by my own thoughts. But they were obsessive. So I was stuck face down, recovering from surgery, blind in one eye, obsessing and jealous, angry, humiliated, bewildered. It's funny to recall that we tumbled toward two more visits even after all of this. One was in January, and we canceled it. Then, finally, in February 2019, over Valentine's Day, a visit arranged hastily, and canceled after rethinking all of it, three days later. Anyway, here it is, December 2020, in a plague year. Incredible changes have occurred since these times. A different life has emerged for both of us. L is on her way to her third child, due in two months. I'm in a new city, post PhD, with a new job. I keep testing myself in what is probably not an accurate self-check, around a total hypothetical. What if. What if she invited you back. Would you still say "yes, of course"? It's at that point in the story where all of the protagonists friends, family, and the entire audience, would be yelling "oh fuck no! run away!" But we all know that a). hypotheticals are meaningless, b). endings don't always make sense in ways that one might hope, c). protagonists sometimes go completely against the tide. They walk into the burning building. They return to the abusive or unavailable beloved. They leave the available, perfectly suited beloved for reasons that might even be obscure to themselves. When L cut off all social media contact a few months ago, and mentioned that it was at least in part for her own mental health, a vital part of me was relieved, because this hypothetical invitation and my hypothetical response became far less likely. I want to think I would say no, anyway. But we all know people who said "yes of course" under far worse, or more conflicted, or more "unhealthy" narratives. Maybe I could at least get to where L was when I proposed to her. "yes. If possible."