I didn't recognize him at first. We walked into the hostel and glanced in the bar on our way up to the room. There were a couple of guys drinking there. "Is that your friend?" Daryn asked me.
I looked, but their backs were to us. "I don't know. I said I'd meet him at his room."
We went up to the second story of the hostel and knocked, but no one was in the room. "Maybe they were in the bar," Daryn said. So we trooped down again.
As we walked into the bar, the first guy in a white striped shirt turned around and smiled. "Well, hello!"
Yep, it was him.
It's so surreal to meet someone that you had a fling with, years later, in a different country, when both of your lives are so different. I'd met Ben (not his real name) back when I was working in a winery, sorting grapes for the harvest. He was full of energy and enthusiasm for the wine industry, and he introduced me to the artsy wine bar scene. At the time he was living in a fantastic house with a hot tub on the deck and a game room complete with pool table, wine cellar, and wide-screen television, where I watched Sex and the City for the first time.
Even though we only knew each other for a few months, I was always grateful to him for showing me what big city life could be like. We zipped through Portland in his yellow convertible and browsed organic vegetables, Doc Marten shoes, Nike pedometers. The city seemed full of possibilities, potential, and fascinating people I had yet to meet.
Meeting him here, so far from home, brought back memories of Portland. It seemed strange not to remember our relationship as vividly as I remembered the city itself, its feel, its energy. What I felt wasn't nostalgia for him but rather for the sense of possibility I felt at that time and place: the culture of youth, the celebration of being alive, and the promise of bright careers ahead.
So many of my past relationships have been like that. When I think back on them with nostalgia, what I remember most isn't him and me, but rather the feelings I had at that point in my life. For example, when I think of my first love, I remember how excited and aware I felt as I experienced the beauty of those emotions for the first time. Yet the years have faded his face in my memory.
I realize that my journey through love has not been a journey from lover to lover, but rather a journey through myself. Each relationship has taught me new ways of appreciating life. My romantic history is not one of winning and losing but rather of seeing through ever-renewed eyes.
Each relationship expands my sense of who I can be as I learn to enjoy his hobbies, understand his world view, take pleasure in his tastes, respond to his rhythms. I'm not leaving behind my self: I'm becoming greater than I was before.
If we limit our lives to what we like, to how we think, to what we want, then we're keeping ourselves constricted in a tight cage of identity. Loving gives us the gift of opening up our cages and allowing us to dissolve our singularity into something greater.
Even when he leaves us, or we leave him, we carry part of him with us: the way he thought, his mannerisms, his favorite books or music or shops. We can appreciate more of life because he shared his world with us.
Yet, last night, I didn't share these thoughts with Ben. Instead, we chatted and drank and caught up with stories until it was time to go home. I promised to give him a call next time I was in Portland, and he promised he'd be back this way again.
And instead of thinking about him on the way home, I simply thought of Portland and how wonderful it will be to experience the city again.