Final Embrace

I turned down an unfamiliar street. I saw her coming in the opposite direction. It had been years since our parting. She was as radiant and beautiful as the day when we had first met decades ago.

Without speaking a word she caught me in a full embrace. I felt her slender body as we touched. A smile spread across her face the like of which I had never seen in all the years we had been together.

“I can forgive you now.” She said, “I can forgive you for not giving me all the things I thought the world owed me. I can forgive it all now because I can finally forgive myself and stop blaming the world for being such a wretched place.”

A sense of relief and completion came over me as I embraced her once again. Then suddenly I awoke alone in the dark. I gazed at the foot of my bed into the dim shadows that filled my bedroom half expecting to see her there but there was nothing, nothing but the memory of that final embrace.