I found a picture of you online.
It was a chance encounter.
Not by design nor desire
A fortunate or unfortunate encounter, I do not yet know.
Within me, one thing is clear.
I have long since stopped;
searching for you in every face I see
Feeling my heart clench at the thought of you
Trawling through page after page for the slightest glimmer of your existence
Waiting, wanting, wailing and waning, every minute of the day.

Maybe it's part of some divine joke
That after years of looking for you, I never could find you anywhere.
And yet today, quite unexpectedly,
I chanced upon a photograph of you.
A brief glimpse of a half remembered face and my breath froze in my lungs, if only briefly.
After so many years, I got to see your face
Heart shaped, dimpled cheeked with sparkling eyes the colour of the sky after a stormy day
I got to see your smile
Brilliant, warm and pure as ever
And I was not prepared for dazzling brilliance.

A tendril of emotion rushed through me.
Was it joy? Maybe little bit but not quite everything.
Was it sorrow? I doubt, for what would be the point, after so many years.
Was it anger? Impossible, for how could I feel anger for what we had or thought we had.
Was it regret? Perhaps, but I could never fully regret my lived experiences.
I could not tell you how I felt in that moment.
Maybe it was all of these and none of these.

Only that it was good to see you smile.
It was good to recall even vaguely, the fading echoes of our past lives;
those haunting spectres of spent hours, emotions and discarded futures,
consigned to the deepest parts of my soul.
It was good to know that after so many years that you are well.
That perhaps somewhere you are living life fiercely, true to your values and who you are.
That you are thriving...without me in your life.

It is enough to have seen you in this photograph,
Enough, to have this time frozen memory of you.
I hope you forgive me when I say,
That I do not wish that we meet again in another life.
If there is a reincarnation or rebirth after this one
I do not wish our lives to ever cross.
I hope that we never meet in any parallel or alternate universe.
I hope our souls only ever meet in this life
For the burden of these memories only has to be mine,
In this life alone and in this universe alone.
It is enough for me to have seen you for the last time.