“Do you know what loving you was like?”

It was a rhetorical question. Even so, I paused long enough to watch her tilt her head down toward the table between us. Those hands I used to poke fun at for always getting so damn clammy left a faint trace of sweat on the oversized ‘Connecticut Muffin’ mug she set down. She waited for me to continue.

“It was like getting a whiff, or a taste, of something really, really wonderful.”

And it was. When we were good, before the infidelity came between a sixteen year friendship-turned romance, we were really, really good. Not good enough to compete with the emotional dependency and attachment she had with the abusive ex of 10 years she up and left me for, but still.. we were good.

“It was like sifting through a river and finding a huge vein of fools gold,” I continued. “You take it out, hold it up to the sky, and tell everyone around you ‘it’s gold, it’s gold!’ You start having all sorts of crazy dreams about how your future will look, making the kinda plans folks only do when they’ve hit it big.”

“But then, you crack it open, and you realize that it wasn’t real gold all along. And it’s … it’s a bummer.”

Somewhere in my little speech, she and I switched roles. Her gaze focused intently on me, watching and studying a face she’d spent nearly 20 years getting familiar with, but hadn’t seen in the three years since our breakup. And I was the one looking down at the coffee table, fiddling with a papercup still filled to the brim with something called ‘Dragonfly Green Tea.’

“But,” she said slowly, “are you upset that you found it?”