Most of us regret having taken actions regarding life decisions because of fear or confusion or not wanting to disappoint others. How our lives would be different now if we had seized the opportunities life presented is something we can’t know. And we may be perfectly happy in our current lives even as we retell the stories of lost opportunity. Writing this week on the theme of lost love and what it offers writing, I found myself thinking, “Time and distance tend to crystallize events.”

I researched the word crystallize: A soluble substance will saturate a hot solution and when that solution cools, the substance will form crystals. Chemists, whose work depends on crystallization, say that to do this successfully, they must blend science and art, experimentation, observation and imagination. How like writing!

Our journey through words is a hot solution into which our experience dissolves and when our works of art are finished, it is as if a solvent has cooled and the intricacies of our lives appear translucent and luminous. When it comes to dissolving regret into the solvent of our poetry and prose, we are forced to enjoy the bittersweet nature of life.

Here is my story of how un-acted upon love in my youth has offered me many occasions for writing:

It’s the summer of 1966. I am 18 and lonely at Laurel Lake Camp in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains. My steady boyfriend of two years, who satisfies my parents’ desires for me, is traveling in Europe, his debate team’s prize for winning our state’s championship. I am the bunk counselor for 10-year-old girls. One of my campers is a diabetic and doesn’t want the camp nurse to give twice daily shots. She’s also a kid who eats tons of sugar in the dining room and worries us all. I’m sure this summer is not going to be fun. I concentrate on my return home at summer’s end and my reunion with my boyfriend, but since we are both off to different colleges in the fall, our weeks together will be very short; therefore, even in my thoughts of seeing him, I am feeling lonely.

It’s a rainy night not long after camp starts and counselors are gathered in the gym to pass some wet evening hours. I am not playing volleyball. I have my current issue of Scientific American magazine with me and sit on the bleachers reading it. I plan on majoring in biology because my favorite teacher in high school was the biology teacher. I am probably wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. I am short and my hair is short and, without a doubt, curly, especially in the high humidity of the East Coast summer. I don’t feel anything near attractive next to the long bodies of the other girls’ counselors who have already started college. I am sure I think, “At least I’ll have time to study up and be better prepared for my courses in fall–chemistry, psychology, honors English, honors sociology.

“Hi, there. That’s an unusual choice of summer reading material.”

The counselor talking to me is the summer tennis pro. He’s from France, I remember from our brief orientation session. I think his eyelashes are the thickest I’ve ever seen on a man, the olive tone of his skin exotic in the dim light, which is making it hard for me to read.

“My teacher this year liked us to read this magazine. I have a subscription.”

He stays and talks with me. I learn that  he is a new graduate in Chemical Engineering from Columbia University, that he is earning his airfare back to France where he will attend graduate school and play semi-professional soccer. I do not know that my lonely summer is about to turn into my most wonderful summer. I do not know I’ll be lying in his arms nights by the lake under the moon in the moist grass, listening to him whisper, “Je t’aime. Je t’aime.”

I do not know that soon on our days off we will head to the Delaware River and spend afternoons swimming and sunning, that the evenings we are allowed to leave camp, we will cross state lines to drink beer and dance in New York state, where the drinking age at that time is 18. Even if I have a glimmer of a dream about any of that, I never consider that when my bunk of girls goes on its several-day canoe trip, he will be one of the male counselors assigned to guide and protect us, that he and I will lie next to each other, attracted though chaste, in our sleeping bags under the stars.

“Marry me and come to France with me. You can learn the language and then go to the Sorbonne. I know we should be together. I’ve never felt this way before.” I am to be a freshman at the University of Wisconsin. How can I accept his proposal? I don’t have the courage to announce to my family that I am leaving; perhaps what I also fear is the task of learning proficient French.

On the morning of our departure from camp, the buses line up. His is bound for Manhattan and me for the New Jersey suburbs. We stand together as long as we can until boarding is imperative. Tears flow from my eyes.

The next week, despite the fact that my high school boyfriend is home, my summer love and I meet for a date in Manhattan before he leaves for Paris. After a French lunch where the waitress calls me Madam (his wife), we see the film “A Man and A Woman”–true and unrequited love–and then dinner and a disco. He accompanies me home on the bus and stays the night at my parents’ house. Early the next day, again waiting for a bus, we face another parting. When I am with him, my heart is light as a heart feels in its proper place. Still, I cannot gather the courage to redirect my energies away from the college education my parents want me to start on in my own country and the expected return to my high school sweetheart even though we’ll have a distance relationship.

Three years later, my love calls me on my wedding day to this man who is, I am told, culturally right for me. I hear my true love’s voice and cry at my delight; how always right we feel with each other.

A year later, he is in New York. I go to visit him. There is nothing I feel more truly, sitting in a room in his mother’s apartment, than the desire to be with him and to leave the life I have taken on from my own lack of courage. I come home and rip up every address–there are three by then–that I have for him, as if my desire can be shredded.

Nine years later, I divorce. I write a poem one February morning while sitting by my new window watching water bead on the branches of two Japanese maples:

…perhaps my name still slips
to your tongue as words
sometimes slip. For cabbages and sunlight
you’d say my name, for canoe, laurel,
Minnow and finch. The wind is old
And carries many words.

I loved you. I loved you.

I try to find my lost love by sending postcards in French to the 60 or so people I find by his last name in directories for both his hometown and Paris, where I thought he must have stayed. No one who answers me knows him.

When my daughter is 15, she decides to go to France to spend her junior year of high school abroad. Just before she departs, she asks if I found “that guy from France.” When I shake my head no, she asks where I saw him last. “New York.” I can’t believe I completely blocked that location out, that I decided to forget that his mother kept an apartment in the City. Before she leaves the country, my daughter brings me addresses from directories in our library for everyone in Manhattan by my love’s last name. Several months later, I clear my desk and see the list. Why not? I mail 11 letters in English.

Early fall. The leaves outside my window are turning. The phone rings early.

“I hear you are looking for me.”

For three hours, we speak about the years between then and now, so strong in our connection we hear the sounds of fish jumping and paddles in the river, smell the wooden cabins surrounded by trees. He married 10 years ago, which means that when I sent out my original letters, he was a single man. Why had I not thought to send a letter to Manhattan? I tell him about my poem and my letters and my complete lack of courage to be myself and have what I wanted.

Later that day, I rent the film “A Man and A Woman” and find that there is “A Man and A Woman Twenty Years Later.” Same actors, only this time their love is requited. I watch. I cry and cry.

Poems from that loss will come several times over many years.

****

Here’s the full poem I wrote after I sent those postcards to people in Nice and Paris with my lost love’s last name:

In February

Today the cherry tree is grey
as fossil. On its bare boughs
raindrops are winter pearls.

Yesterday a brief change in the weather.
High in the branches a robin,
the fat warrior of spring,
held its breast to the early sun.

Suppose when my letter reaches you,
I have fallen from your memory
like ripe fruit. That would be
most perfect, to remain the pull
of something finished.

Or perhaps my name still slips
to your tongue as words
sometimes slip. For cabbages and sunlight
you’d say my name, for canoe, laurel,
minnow and finch. The wind is old
and carries many words.

I loved you. I loved you.

And while my daughter was in college, I was reading poetry by Robert Hass and again remembered the lovely summer in which I had fallen in love and wrote another poem.

Reading Hass During a Coastal Storm, Mid-November

I read “when you pour coffee and walk outside
blinking in the sun” and I smell summer,
the long ago scent of grasshopper in my palms.
I smell my children years ago fresh from their baths,
the baby powder on their goodnight kisses. Their angel
eyes disappear once again into sleep. I hear the brushing
of their feet in the night, sweet touch of restlessness
they brought to my bed.

Then I hear your breath at the edge of the lake
when we lay together in a separate life wrapped in a blanket
under the stars. Each day I moved in your direction
through the Pocono laurels until summer gave way to fall
and leaves had in them hints of yellow. All day we lay
on a riverbank, your shoulders pressed against mine,
a state we had come to believe in.

When my daughter graduated from college, we traveled together in France, and I wrote another poem remembering this love:

To My First Love, Jacques

My daughter dozes beside me
on the train from Paris to Rouen,
a city whose name is difficult
for me to say though she has sung it
and I have sung it back,
as you and I practiced that summer of ’66.

Rou-en, Rou-en, French r in my throat,
Choke of sadness, en, dull blow of regret.

I never let us find out who our us would
have been, French Catholic and American Jew.
In the train’s long swoosh, leaves of cattails
bend along the Seine and the brown
crowns of their heavy stalks stay upright and still.

Horses nuzzle fences, their faces warm against the boards
as your arm on my back in that dream I have
where you sit down beside me and everyone
who has ever needed me nods and leaves the room.
And another came, too, as I imagined meeting my love at a European museum:
Meeting You at La Grand’ Place

At the second story of the Musée des Beaux Arts,
I study your eyelids, lashes sturdy as an artists’ brush.

I let the canoe of your voice take me to the riverbank
where you called over the sparkling current, whispered
I love you in the mountain air and meadows.

We were each other’s simple provisions, no round
café tables, not 15^th century portraits of St. Anthony’s temptation,
no cameras, no porto, no tourists. Our villa was wherever our feet were.

Who were we to say goodbye for no important reason
by a red bus in morning? Confusion shifts our feet now, tucks hands
into our pockets, bows our heads, flowers heavy on their stem.

Years after writing that poem, I was back on the Atlantic seaboard where we had first met; on the beach I felt the loss again:

I Brought My Tears to the Sea

Beyond the beach’s white thighs and the waves’
swell of desire, there was moonlight on calm water.
It made part of the ocean shine like armor
or the metal door to a vault.

How could I bury my heart?

On the beach in morning, wind ruffled
the wings of a kite and I knew memory was silk,
moonlight, a robe I would wear never to forget you.

Obsessed? Stuck? Not able to put the past behind? That’s a writer’s life. Just because we write about someone or some place or some thing once, doesn’t mean we can’t write more about it. Writers have obsessions, whether they are about losses or times in our lives that felt absolutely right or about a way of seeing into the world. Don’t judge yours. Use them. Write.