Sorry this is a little late. Life has been hectic, and Cosima wouldn't stop jabbering.

Just FYI, I doubt there will be an update next week, as I'll be away for a few days at the beach. If I get rained in, however, I'll give it a shot.

Thanks for reading, friends!

Maybe I fought it, resisted, denied it. Maybe I was afraid of losing who I'd become and what I'd learned of myself. Maybe I was scared that seeing her, being with her, loving her was a false idol, a distraction, rather than the culmination of the right person finally arriving at the right time. But I couldn't fight it for long. The truth was I had known it almost from the moment we met, when our hands touched in a greeting, when our eyes connected and widened in response. This was her. This was the one. My person. The other half of my spirit. Everything else was just static in the signal, temporary uncertainties, insomuch as ten years could be a blink in comparison to the span of a spirit. It had felt long, the time without her, the time in-between. But once she was there again, it faded, seeming short and insubstantial as a half-remembered dream when you finally, fully wake up.

Well, I couldn't let it be that easy. I was human. I was me.

There was part of me that kept insisting I be rational, that the past was the past despite the way my heart rushed to beat in time with hers again. I did have an excuse, besides fear for myself, surprise, and skepticism. I had fear for my sisters, for my family, and especially for the little one who was a gift I'd thought I was giving to my friends, and turned out to also be a gift to myself. I had people to protect. That part of me that doubted Delphine, or at least the advisability of engaging her right in the middle of all this did have some convincing points, not to mention it was the path of least resistance.

But I wasn't done recalling all that had transpired between us. I remembered that night. That night I read her letter. The one I reread so many times. The letter that apologized for pushing me, but not for loving me. The swirls of ink from an obviously trembling hand that turned into her voice in my mind as I read it and said, I am here, I love you, I believe this love is real.

I want to push for what feels so right, so real and essential between us, she wrote, because I still love you and crave you. But I also want to release you, to give you the time and space to make your own decisions and feel your own feelings without pressure from me. It's a difficult place to be in, and I know that just puts my tension on you. Cosima, I don't even know if you're with someone or you're free! I don't know how much you have changed your outlook or how different the life you lead is and what you want today, in the now. So, I can tell you this. I will release you. I will stop bothering you, following you, trying to be close. I will try to schedule an earlier departure, not because I want to run away from you, but because you have the right to live your life without my interference, my feelings for you and the longing I find it so hard to repress. In return, I ask for nothing, because there's nothing I think you should or must give. I will just make sure that Margot has all my contact information. That way, I force nothing on you, but if someday you want to contact me, to yell at me or discuss this or reconnect, you can reach out to me, and I will be available to you for whatever you want. I make you that promise, as surely and seriously as I made that promise to love all of you, you and your sisters. All you have to do is send me word, Cosima, in whatever spirit or emotion you wish, and I will come running, I will drop everything for you. Because I have changed, Cosima, and I know you have, but the love I feel for you, even all this time later, never can.

That night at the retreat, with the wind and the rain and the thunder being the least of the reasons I tossed and roiled in my bed, unable to sleep, she released me, let me go, let me be me. She loved me, and she left it up to me. There would be no more doing what she thought was best for me despite myself. She would love me, but she would let me be who I was, the combination of the person who I was when I was born, who I grew to be via nurture, and who I cultivated once I absorbed the mind-blowing circumstances that made me one sister of many. She acknowledged that I was free, even as she explained why we would always be connected. And, in doing that… she helped me believe that a love chosen against fear could be the most freeing thing of all. She made me remember: we never had to do anything to prove we belonged to and with each other. We just needed to let ourselves know it. In a world of people trying to get by with lies, our connection was never a lie. A lie would be impossible, because we could feel it. We could feel the truth. The truth was our love.

In the time we'd been apart, I had learned to practice mindfulness, to observe the present moment and pay attention to my thoughts and emotions as they happened. That night, I felt something new. I saw how my present moments had stretched out behind me into my past, and it was if I could clearly see all the moments that I let slip by, that I held back from taking a chance with her, could stretch into a future where I'd never really been mindful at all.

I ran to her. I remember seeing her sitting bolt upright in her bed, her cream-soft skin illuminated in the blue-white flash of lightning, the beauty of her startled eyes and stiffened curves glowing as she gasped in surprise. The haze of the mosquito net around her, separating us, seemed like an affront, and the few feet of distance between us telescoped into ten years of longing and feeling something, somehow, was so wrong.

I ran to her and pressed into her and I couldn't get close enough. We couldn't get close enough as we made love, as I desperately entered her as if I could crawl under her skin and fuse our hearts together. And she opened to me like one of the rainforest flowers, pale in the faint light but gaudy in her desire. Her desire for me, for us, her acceptance and forgiveness and joy at being forgiven, all pulsed like heat from within her and joined my own, surrounding us in that energy that science has yet to prove but you know if you have felt it. It's not just the firing of nerves or the one missing soulmate, returned; two soulmates rejoined. It's fitting into and resonating with everything at its purest. We both broke and reformed stronger, kissing each other's tears away and holding each other as if holy.

"I love you," I said, and it broke my walls completely. "I still love you, goddamn it. Don't ever pull away from me again."

She took my face in her soft, tender hands and kissed me, swearing "Je t'aime… never again, mon amour… never again."

Time can bend when shit hits the fan. You can stop feeling while under stress, or you can feel some things hugely, while others somehow shrink and dull. The miles had been ticking by as we rode in the car through the fields and small towns near Woodstock, and although, off an on, I followed the turns on the GPS as Michael made them while I clutched Teo's hand with one of mine and my son in my lap with the other, at times I closed my eyes and felt the rush of all these thoughts and feelings go through me. I could smell the sweetness of my little boy and his bubblegum bath wash behind the warmth of his ear, but as much as I clung to him, I found my heart also reached out to another. To her.

Another night came back to me, then. The night before the last we spent at the silent retreat. We'd had dinner with my friend Javi and then I'd taken her to see a sea turtle depositing her clutch. I had thought we were having a great time, but suddenly she whirled away from me, fast-stepping through the sand in a stumbling race-walk, holding sobs in with her hand. I had to push to catch up to her, but when I did, she wasn't just sad or upset. She was angry, and rightfully so.

She had found out that Shay, the very woman I'd run away with when I ran away from her, and I were still friends. That Shay had been there through my cure, and Sevvy's birth. When I had tried to tell Delphine I was sorry before, I had meant to express how I knew I could have given her another chance, how I could have listened better. I knew that I had let myself become overwhelmed by emotions when the last weeks of the DYAD debacle went down, and that I'd felt the only way I thought I could handle them and keep on with my purpose to find and deliver the cure was to run away. I had thought I needed to disappear completely, not just for my safety, but to make everything that was tearing me apart, wearing me down, disappear from my mind. If they couldn't see me, I couldn't see them, seemed to be my logic, as if I was a baby playing peekaboo. And for a while, it seemed to have worked. But in seeing Delphine again, falling for her all over again, falling back in love, I realized what a child I had truly been.

Children before a certain age don't understand object permanence. I had seen it in Sevvy at a few months old. If I moved a favourite toy of his out of his field of vision, it was as it if didn't exist. It wasn't until later that he understood that things could be moved and even hidden, yet remain whole without his attention.

Of course, life is more complicated than toys for children. When I was learning meditation I found out that the continuance of what we can't see or touch was a part of pretty much every major religion out there, yet while it was always deemed important and beneficial, it served different purposes. Samsara, the wheel of life life, describes the theory of life as ever changing, yet cyclical. In Hinduism, this means people are born and die and are born again, inhabiting different places, times and bodies, yet each one has an eternal soul that remains itself throughout the incarnations. Meditation can be used to connect with that inner, timeless soul, and, in knowing it, one can know freedom. In Buddhism, however, everything is changing. There is no continuous self, and coming to fully know that is the only way to end the suffering of life after life. Different Buddhist texts deal with this in different ways, but it is holding on to anything as if it were permanent that causes the pain of loss when it is inevitably taken away.

So in running from DYAD I had hoped to make the pain of my attachment to Delphine go away, and, to do that, I had tried to put not just by body, but my thoughts of her away. Maybe I'd moved beyond peekaboo, but in this she was like Schrödinger's cat. She existed in my mind both as real and vital, someone I might find myself wondering about where she was and what had happened to her if I let my guard down, and as a piece of the past, something I tried to detach from, like a truncated sentence that inevitably stretched into an ellipsis. The wheel of my life turned on and everything was changing, but her unknown state of being didn't delete that she had made a mark on me. I'd find questions lurking in the corners of my mind though I tried to avoid them: Was holding on to the memory of her an unnecessary cause of suffering, or did I have to confront and come to terms with what I felt for her to be whole and wise?

I'd like to think I would have tried to resolve things with her eventually. I had more often wondered about her as time passed, and wondered about my own perceptions of her and if they did her justice. Maybe my inability to connect with anyone else in quite the same way was my fault, because I'd become too attached to how much I loved her in the beginning. I had definitely built up some defenses against getting hurt again that didn't let my other lovers fully in, even as I tried to justify my caution as necessary to continuing to live my own life and help my sisters. But maybe, despite having met and been in relationships with wonderful people, I couldn't feel the same way about them that I did about her simply because she was the one, the only one I possibly could love in just that way. I had thought about trying to find her, to finally leave the past in the past by facing her in the present, truthful but detached, accepting that she had gone on without me and lived her own truth. I'd like to say that the only thing stopping me was concern that Sevvy would be safe. But, even as I crept slowly towards deciding on some action, I didn't quite get there. Until fate, or chance, or karma had thrown us back together again, there in that place that was all about healing, and growth, and peace.

And so that night on the beach, with the miracle of birth of an endangered species happening feet away from us, I saw her anger and I knew she was right. I knew I had been waiting for it, wondering if and when it would finally come out in her, and that until she felt that anger, along with the hurting and joy and absolution, she couldn't understand how truly sorry I was.

So I told her. I told her how I knew how much I had fucked up and how stupid I was, and that I had blocked myself from thinking about her and how I had felt for her because I thought that was the only way to go on. I told her about that night after she'd left for Frankfurt, how I had been so close to slipping away, but that the vision of her, the pure and inexplicable and beautiful light of her love had pulled me back, gasping, into the world. I told her how, despite that, I had still been afraid, afraid of getting hurt, afraid of getting rejected, still sore and shaking from her breaking up with me, even if she had done it to try to save us all. I acknowledged that I had listened to that fear, and I had left, and I hadn't given her a chance. I just hoped she would give me the chance I had denied her, because I wanted us to be together.

And, like an angel, she forgave me, and our love was whole, again. That's who she was. That's how things were between us.

Shit, I thought, my attention shifting back to being in the car, on this very strange trip, am I being an idiot, again? And I must have given Sevvy a squeeze as I inhaled by his ear, because he leaned back with his little hands on my chest and said

"Mommy?" so quiet.

And I wiped a tear from my eye with one hand and I looked at him, his face so dear and his expression so solemn and open, and

"What, Cookiehead?" I asked him.

"Don't be afraid. It's going to be alright," he said.

For a moment, I wondered at him, my little boy, suddenly comforting me, taking on the gravitas of a man, and I wondered if it was fair to him to be the one to reassure his mother. But then I saw something, some depth in his eyes that reminded me of someone, another special child who had sometimes known things a child shouldn't know. He reminded me of his cousin.

I let out a little gasp, part cry, and maybe part an astounded laugh.

"Okay, baby," I told him,"okay, I believe you," and reached for my phone.