thousands of miles, a few years...

You know how sometimes people say you don't know what you have till it's gone?
People are dumb. And sometimes right.
I wouldn't say that I'm a hopeless romantic.
Actually, sometimes I'm a little bit of a runner about commitment-it makes me nervous.
But once there was a time when someone came along and I realized that I really really really liked him.
I even wrote about him a few times. I didn't think that it would be anything that would last for a while. Then it came to the end and...
I was ready for it to keep going.
But we'd made a mistake. We'd given ourselves a deadline.
Looking back, things wouldn't have worked out at that moment in time but giving ourselves a deadline is one of the stupidest things I have ever done.
There are things I wish I could take back. There were moments that he came back into my life over the past year but among those times I was afraid, I was hesitant, I was focusing on other things and other people, I was convinced that I had found another boy that I liked even more.
And it wasn't till I really saw, till I understood, that I remembered. I remembered everything. The good, the bad, the ugly, the wonderful...all of it.
The summer nights, the laughing, the fact that he remembered things like my favorite places to go, when he would turn up my favorite songs in the car, how he made me laugh, the way he would pull me over to sit next to him in the front seat while he was driving, floating down a river in the rain, the way he'd reach over to hold my hand. And the times I cried because of the distance, because he was distant, the fact that he wasn't him when I would finally see him on weekends, the fights, the anger, the unkind things we'd said, and the very end.
Coincidentally, all this flashed into my mind when I saw him up at a pulpit giving his farewell talk to his ward.
There would be one more time that I would see him before he'd leave on an adventure for two years. I would choke and not tell him the things I would want to most. But I would get a hug that would last me for two years. And I would hear him say one last thing to me, "You go and get your degree." To everyone else, it may not seem like a great farewell statement. But to me, it meant the world because he knows me. He knows the things that mean the very most to me.
So yeah, you don't really know what you had till it's thousands of miles away. And you don't know if you can ever have it back. So you just hope, and wait....and check the mail every day.