“Headed back to Alaska today. Going home. Had fun seeing ya. Take care of yourself.”
That was the text message I received the day after I saw him — for the first time in almost four years.
The day after having a conversation I had waited over four years to have.
It was an evening in April of 2015- the first time I’d seen him since October of 2011. The first time we had spoken to one another in over 3 years. There was an eerie familiarity in all of it — the way he smiled, the sound of his voice, even the way he once felt like home to me — but it was also clear that time had passed, that life had gone on, and we had become very different people.
We sat side by side at the bar of a small pizza restaurant, two strangers who once knew each other by heart, drunk on infatuation and all of the beautiful things that a young, naïve love is.
I told him how he’d broken my heart in the end.
He told me how the abortion had devastated him.
I told him I’d spent a long, long time resenting the words he’d repeated so often — “I got you,” and “I’ll be here for you every step of the way” — only to turn around and do the exact opposite.
At one point, his voice tightened as he said, almost defensively, “I really loved you, Caroline.”
I didn’t say it back.
I didn’t even think about what to say. I just told the truth:
“That’s hard to hear.”
There was so much I didn’t ask.
I didn’t ask if he was glad I had the abortion, or if he believed now — four years later — that it was the right thing.
I didn’t ask if he ever wonders what life would be like if we hadn’t made that choice, or if he sometimes pauses, like I do, and imagines the could-have-beens.
I didn’t ask him anything, really. Nor did I share how I feel about it now that time has softened the edges of that pain.
I told him I still remember the date — that the four-year mark had just passed and that I’d felt it on the day.
I don’t recall how he reacted.
Maybe he didn’t.
Maybe I just didn’t look.
I miss certain things about him.
But what I’ve always missed most was the way he made me feel.
At one point he said softly, “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
I asked why.
He hesitated, then said it was difficult for him to be reminded of how beautiful he thinks I am.
Back then, I never doubted that he saw me that way. He made sure I knew it. He told me why he loved me, what made me special, and how much he looked forward to every moment we’d spend together. He made me feel like I was home.
Seeing him again after all those years, I remembered how he used to make me feel — but I also realized how much of that feeling had faded. What surprised me most was that its absence didn’t hurt. Something that used to be there, simply wasn’t anymore, and I was at peace with that. Somehow I was even at peace with the fact that immediately after I had the abortion, he had yanked his devotion away, broken up with me and refused to even speak to me without explanation.
What happened between us is a story that has beautiful parts, and a tragic ending. It’s a story that’s finished, a story that has already been written. There’s no revising, no re-writing, no erasing.
And for the first time, I didn’t want to.
For the first time, I understood that simply remembering it — all of it — is okay too.
It was nostalgic, yes. But even sitting next to him, I could feel the distance of four years and two separate lives between us.
I no longer want to go back to what was.
I only want to remember what’s worth remembering, and accept the rest — the hard parts, the sad parts — for what they are.
I really am okay.
I sat there, looked at him, and knew that this moment — this one small reunion — was enough.
It didn’t need to lead anywhere.
At the end of a journal entry I wrote a year and a half before that day, I’d written one final line:
“We will recover from this, I know.”
And sitting there beside him, I realized — I already had.
But I hadn’t recovered with him. I’d done it on my own.
Although we had shared the pregnancy, what came next — the abortion, the grief, the silence, the slow work of forgiving — that all belonged to me alone.
Healing was something he couldn’t give me, it was something I had to claim for myself.
For years, I thought closure would come from that long-awaited conversation, from hearing him say the right words.
But it didn’t. It came quietly, sitting across from him in that bar, recognizing that I no longer needed anything from him to be okay.
That was the moment I finally understood what recovery really meant.
It wasn’t about erasing the past — it was about outgrowing the version of myself who still lived there. And somehow, without even realizing, I had done just that.
