It will be in Georgia. It will be Taipei.
We will meet with the faint scent of peaches and of nectar caught up in our stilled, warm breath across from the Carolina coast. We will find ourselves again amongst strange people in a land of different customs far across the Pacific Sea.
It does not matter where we come together. It is only that someday, somewhere, you will be here before me.
It will be in Georgia.
It will be Taipei.
It will be Buenos Aires or Venice or Greece.
And it will be before the storm.
Before the storm, I will not tell you how I have missed you, for it will have been too many years to ever admit. But something will have changed. Something fundamental and true, and you will look to me with warm brown eyes across a steaming street lined with blossoming branches, or with a turn of your head beside a cart in an Asian city, and meet me as an equal as you have never done before.
It will never, ever be here.
I will look to you remembering all of the things that you have meant and all that you once taught me though you never knew you did. I will speak to you, confident and terrified, to ask you where you have been. You will rattle off the cities like laundry lists but know exactly what I mean.
It will be in Georgia, with the sky settling dimly through purple clouds that signify the coming of something fierce.
It will be Taipei, against the ominous background of mountains with the violence of all the land.
Before the storm I will tell you all that I have ever longed to tell you with less than a glance. And then – only then – then, together we will run through sheltered cover-ways, trying to escape the rain that I have already lived through in my heart.
This rain will release my envy.
This rain will drown your demons.
This rain will never, ever fall here, and we will know it, driven away by the parched and painful sensation in our throats that leads us to different lands.
Beyond the storm you will stand before me with your arms raised toward a rising sun, and you will find what you never even knew you were missing.
It will be in Georgia.
It will be Taipei.
And know that I will bring the storm.