He’d been married before, briefly, decades ago, to someone wrong for him in ways that had taken years to fully understand. By the time he met Annika he was fifty-three, settled into a life he’d assumed was its final shape, no longer expecting anything to rearrange itself.
It rearranged itself anyway.
“I wasn’t looking,” he told her once, early on, almost apologetically, as though the lack of searching diminished what had happened. “I want you to know that. I’d genuinely made peace with being alone.”
“Is that a complaint?”
“It’s a confession. I didn’t think this was still available to me. I’m trying to explain why I keep looking at you like I can’t quite believe it.”
She’d understood, because her own story ran roughly parallel — a marriage that had ended badly in her forties, a long stretch of building a life she’d assumed was complete without anyone else in it.
Now, four years into whatever this was — they’d stopped trying to name it formally, finding the labels insufficient for what they’d built — Casimir still occasionally looked at her with that same quality of disbelief, like checking that something fragile hadn’t shattered overnight.
“You’re doing it again,” Annika said, catching him mid-look over breakfast.
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me like you’re checking I’m still here.”
“I am checking.” He reached for her hand across the table. “I spent a long time assuming this part of life was finished. I like making sure it isn’t.”
There’s a particular gratitude, she thought, available only to those who’ve genuinely given something up and then unexpectedly received it back. Not the easy gratitude of the young, who haven’t yet lost much. The hard-won kind. The kind that never quite stops marveling.
✦ Today’s Reflection
Is there something in your life you’d made peace with not having, that arrived anyway? How has that changed the way you experience it?
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Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 
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