The Greenbelt. Yep, the Belt that is Green. That's where it all started.
Well... some people say it all started with the Big Bang, but that's WAY out of this context.
Austin was my home now, and I was trying to adjust. Four months and counting, and I was still looking for points of interest and local activities that I might like. Both Andrea and Marcos had talked to me about "The Greenbelt", this very cool forest-like area near our office with a path through it for nature-loving people to go and hike, bike, swim, or whatever you might like to do in a forest-like riverside whose river fills up nicely during the warmer seasons. And I was piqued.
So when Marcos showed me the entrance to this peaceful path of nature, I made up my mind to go. So this other day I put on my tennis shoes and a sporty blue long-sleeved shirt, drove to it, and started on the trail. The rocky path immediately began sloping downhill, forming a slippery rockslide that could turn dangerous, given enough bad judgement and bad luck. It was getting late already that day, so I kind of trotted down the path to hurry and see what did it look like from all the way down. It took me about 10 minutes to reach a low dirt area with a fork in the path and couple of direction signs I didn’t read. Besides a more shadowy path and taller rocks at the sides of the canyon, I didn’t really see anything impressive enough, so I ran back up as fast as I could to avoid the rising darkness.
I knew I had seen but a very small part of what the whole Greenbelt was really about, so the very next weekend, I put on sporty clothes again, took the Canon camera I had just recently bought from Marcos, and went to the Greenbelt again. There wasn’t really much to look at as I went down the rocky path. The rocks were nice and all, but they didn’t really inspire me to take a picture of them. When I reached the signs again, I went down the road that seemed to go deeper into the forest. A couple of guesses and a bit of instinct brought me to a bridge of rocks placed across the river. And I just went WOW.
It was just very very nice. As if it were a place that came out from a fairy tale. The little rock bridge looked as if it had been lifted up by the river itself as a courtesy to anyone who might want to cross it. The downstream water bubbled playfully through the rocks, producing this soothing whisper. The surface was crystal clear when viewed from above, but from an angle, it was calm enough to mirror the trees and sky above, producing this gorgeous image:
, of which I took a picture of. I spent an hour or two down there, enjoying the sights, sounds, and smells of nature, but I eventually spent up my wonder and walked up the path back to my car.
Wanting to share this fabulous place with others, I asked several of my coworkers if they wanted to take a hiking trip to the Greenbelt that weekend. Some people liked the idea of a work outing and said “maybe”, but after a couple of days, everyone I had asked confirmed that, for some reason or another, they would not be able to go. I was kind of disappointed, but did not give up.
It was during these days that a new employee had come into the office. At first I wasn’t sure if she was just a visitor or a formal employee, but as the days went by and she kept coming in and sitting in the same cubicle, I inferred she was going to stay for a while. I was curious about her. Tall and thin, with wavy, brown, long hair, I liked the style she portrayed when she came in to the office with her long, dark blue skirt.
So I thought of asking her to go to the Greenbelt with me. I didn’t know her and she didn’t know me, but there was no real reason I couldn’t just go over to her desk, introduce myself, and start up a conversation, right? At that time I was conscientiously trying to improve my social skills, so one day I just got the impulse, I focused, I got up from my desk, and walked up to talk to her.
The conversation went better than expected. It started with an apparently-confident “Hello”, it followed with name introduction (“My name is Antonio, I sit over there”, “Hi, I’m Jerol”), and then it moved on from topic to topic. I mentioned the Greenbelt and told her how nice it was down there, then asked for her email so I could send her some pictures. So she wrote down her address on a little piece of paper. I read the address out loud:
@ymail.com . , u mean gmail?
out loud on a little piece of paper. er email so I could send her some pictures. p with me. while. Ymail? Don’t you mean gmail?
No, ymail.
Is that like a new name for Yahoo! addresses? I guess they’re trying to look like gmail?
I guess…
Her guess was as good as mine. Very happy with our first conversation and satisfied with my social performance, I walked back to my desk and sent her the link with the pictures I had taken at the Greenbelt and uploaded at my Picasa album:
http://picasaweb.google.com/antoniojl/BartonCreekGreenbelt
She told me the pictures were beautiful, and I told her we should go with other people from the office. A little surprisingly for me, she agreed to go on the weekend. It was during that week that everyone else I had asked said they couldn’t go that weekend, so in the end, it was only Jerol and me.
We met Saturday morning in the parking lot outside the office. She was wearing a pair of jeans with folded pantlegs and a t-shirt. She took a bottle of water from her car for the hiking trip, then she got in my car, and we drove out to the closest entrance to the Greenbelt, not 1km away from the office.
As we started walking down the trail, there was an awkward silence between us. I wanted the whole trip to be fun and entertaining, but I couldn’t think of what to say. And so we were silent for the first few minutes as we walked down the slippery rock slide to the main path.
I first took her to a small clearing on the side of the hill, from where a whole big picture of the Greenbelt could be seen from above. We both liked it very much, and I took this picture:
We looked at it for about 5 minutes, and then went back to the main path and down to the river. When we found the main clearing on the bottom of the hill, I took her through a short series of paths to the river, where there were already a few other people standing on the river bridge, relaxing and admiring the view.
One couple seemed to be feeding something in the water, so we got closer to see. There were several turtles in the water, swimming around and eating what that people threw at them. As we looked closer, there weren’t only turtles in the water, there were some baby turtles in there as well!
http://picasaweb.google.com/antoniojl/BCGB2 shows some of these turtles.
We stood there around 20 minutes, over the cool, clear water, until we decided to move on. We found a narrow path on the other side of the river I had not seen before, and decided to take it to see where would it take us. A few minutes later, we found a rock on the left side of the path that seemed almost exactly like a bench, looking out at the river. We decided to relax there awhile and admire the view, so we sat down on the rock, and we began talking.
We talked about many things. We started out by commenting how cool of a city Austin was, how fortunate were we to live here, and what had brought each of us here. I was trying to create a cheery, friendly spirit between us, so I was completely honest with what I said. I told her about my desire to travel, how my getting the job at Reddwerks was so unexpected, how fortunate I thought I was by being here, about my tentative plans to study at CMU, that I was looking for a girlfriend, and lamented that the best candidate I had found so far, my newly-found friend Emily Rose, was already happily taken by another guy.
And then she told me about her own circumstances for coming to Austin. Married for 15 years, with 3 children, and living in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, her husband had brutally beat her up only a few months ago while being drunk. With many severe injuries, several broken bones, and afraid for her life, she flew away to Austin to seek the help of her aunt and cousin, who gladly took her in and were helping her to remake her life away from her husband and to get her 3 children back.
I was speechless for a while after she told me that. I looked at her, amazed, stunned that I was looking at a survivor of such terrible circumstances. She looked healthy enough, and when I asked her what had happened to her wounds, she said that she had just recently healed and recovered the use of her whole body, but that she still got throbbing headaches once in a while on the spot where her head had hit the tiled floor. Her look was almost that of normal conversation, but I could see that she was on the verge of tears. I felt very sorry for what she had been through, and then realized that she had just completely confided in me some extremely stressful past experiences, and more than that, had opened up to me emotionally. I felt a little overwhelmed – I felt the responsibility to soothe her, to make her feel better, to try to make her smile again, but I wasn’t sure if I knew how to help with such harsh memories.
I believe I hugged her, trying to soothe her that way. Despite what she had been through, I felt that the fact that she was now here, alive and healthy, was something to be very thankful about. I told her so, and she agreed. I think that helped a little.
A little awkward silence ensued afterwards, during which we both turned to look at the river flow. I wasn’t sure of what to say. Returning to her bad experience would be harsh, and talking about my own, comparatively frivolous interests seemed ridiculous at that point. I believe we then talked about her children, what they were like, and how she planned to get them back from Tennessee. We spent around 2 hours on that bench, talking about diverse subjects, mostly Austin and her children, and sometimes about my own plans for the future. In the end, we realized it was late and decided to walk back up to the car. It had been a relaxing experience overall, but most importantly, we had inadvertently created a unique bond of trust between us.
Our interactions in the office during the next few weeks developed our friendship further. Each day I would arrive no earlier than 9AM, and Jerol always arrived around 8AM, so I would always walk by her desk to say hi, and a little conversation would always arise between us. If I came in a bit too late or she looked too busy we would postpone it, but at some point during the day I would always walk by to have a little casual chat.
Belonging to a generation previous to mine, Jerol was not up to date to all the possibilities that a computer offered, and sometimes had difficulties to perform certain tasks, such as copying music from her CDs, or extracting the pictures from her blackberry into her computer. I happily found that I knew how to do these things, so I offered to help her whenever I could. She was most grateful when I was able to rip the music from her CDs into her computer and into her tiny new pink iPod. So grateful, in fact, that she invited me to dinner one night! I got her invitation through my voicemail, but I had already made an appointment to have pizza with Emily Rose and her boyfriend that same night, so I asked her if we could leave it for lunch the following week, and she agreed.
We had Chipotle that time under my suggestion, and she loved it. Going to lunch together became a frequent activity for us, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. We sometimes talked about our past and present love life – mine had been scarce and was now stagnant, and she was then dating a doctor whom she didn’t really like too much. I was very surprised when she once commented about it at Potbellys’: “If only you were my age, you would be perfect”. I could tell she meant it, but I wasn’t sure what to say. I was 24, she was 41 – I couldn’t grow older on request... did she mean she liked me even though I was so much younger? I had always thought she was pretty, but I had not seriously considered the possibility that she might like me in return. But that comment changed it all – she did like me! I could feel myself become slightly shier after that... I had always been pretty bad at handling potential relationships.
Since she was my best friend in the office, I decided to use Jerol to experiment with an application I found on my blackberry one day: Blackberry Messenger. It took us a little while to get used to understanding the smiley faces appearing on our phone screens, but after a few days, we used it all the time to stay in touch. We told each other “Good Morning ” when we woke up, we invited each other for lunch from our own cubicles, and we had lengthy text conversations at night, with which we both gained great proficiency with Blackberry typing.
During one of these lengthy Blackberry evening conversations, our dialogue went like this:
-“So what are you doing now?”, I asked.
-“I’m going to watch The Matrix”
-“The Matrix! That’s my favorite movie!”
-“Really? It’s my favorite too!”
-“That’s awesome! Great choice!” (wishing I could go watch it too)
-“Do you want to come over to watch it?”
-(surprised) “Really?? :O Umm, ok! :D Just let me get dressed. What’s your address?”
Forty minutes later I was ringing her doorbell, holding a bag of green grapes I had brought to eat during the movie. We had a great time that night eating grapes and watching The Matrix. We then still talked for over an hour on her couch of diverse subjects, such as work at the office and about how she was very close to getting her children back from Tennessee. She seemed to feel better about her life at that point, but she still cried a little when she remembered what had happened to her earlier that year, and we hugged again. I wished that everything would get better for her – she had suffered much, and I wanted to help her in whatever I could to make her life a little better.
During the next few weeks, Jerol managed to recover her children through a court ruling in Tennessee! I was really happy for her! I left her a message first thing after knowing that her trial was over so I could find out, and it was all good – the judge had rightfully decided that she was much more fit to take custody of her children than their father was. I sent her an online congratulations and told her I hoped to meet them soon.
I remember she brought them into the office the next monday. I was sitting at my desk when I saw them all turn around the corner behind her. They were all so small! Three cute little light-haired children followed her mom like little chicks. I tried to surprise her and her children by sneaking behind them, so I stood up to fill my cup with water and then turned around the office to appear behind them. I was right behind them, about to surprise them and greet them, when the smallest one, Jacob, happened to trip backwards and bump into me, spilling some water off my cup. He was so surprised to have bumped into someone he didn’t know that he started to cry! Jerol immediately walked to him and soothed him off. I was bummed out – my surprise greeting had not gone as well as I had expected. Jerol introduced me to all of them, anyway. Hannah, the oldest, was 10. Emily was 8 and Jacob was 6. They were all the cutest kids at that age I could remember. We greeted, and then I went back to my desk. Not a very graceful first introduction, but one to remember.
I went over to Jerol’s house a few more times to watch movies with her and the kids: Matrix Reloaded, Enchanted, Get Smart, and Stardust were a few. Our evenings always started with kids’ movies all together, and then the kids were sent to bed and then Jerol and I were left alone to watch any movies we wanted together. We usually stayed up late after the last movie just sitting together on the couch, talking about diverse subjects, and telling each other a little more about ourselves.
One particular night, I believe we had watched Get Smart followed by Stardust, and our late-night conversations had led us on until almost 3AM. I felt guilty for making her sleep very few hours some of our previous movie nights, so I decided I should leave. It was raining lightly before, but once we went outside, we noticed the rain was now heavy, and there was some thunder along with it. I looked at my white ’96 Camry; although its wipers worked, they sometimes left the windshield so unevenly wet that it was better not to use them at all. I could’ve driven home slowly, but I was honestly having such a good time with Jerol that I didn’t want to leave yet, and told her that I would have to wait for the rain to diminish before I drove back home. She agreed, and so we waited on her porch a little while.
I didn’t have much to say so I didn’t say anything, but just looked around. My gaze rested on Jerol, who then also looked at me. I like staring people down (staring at them until they turn away), so I thought I would play that a little bit with her. But after a little while of staring I realized she wasn’t turning away – she was looking at me directly, meaningfully. I kept looking at her, trying to realize what she meant, and all I could find was happiness, playfulness, a little twinkle in her eyes. I felt really happy to have her as a friend, so I hugged her affectionately. She hugged me quite closely too, and we stayed together for at least a minute. Then I wondered, so my rubs on her back became gentle caresses, and I directed my warm breath to her neck. She did not budge, but kept waiting for something else. I moved my hand down to her lower back, and rubbed my neck with hers. She rubbed her neck with mine in return, and then it was certain. I kissed her on the cheek and broke our hug… we looked at each other again.
-“What are you thinking?”, she asked.
-“That you’re beautiful...”
Our stares locked together, unmoving, eager. I saw a faint playful smile appear on the corner of her lips, and then all resistance was gone. My whole body was shaking like mad, and her eyes became bigger, happier, as I moved in closer, and proceeded to softly touch her lips with mine.
The moist, warm feeling on my lips was only part of the general shock that all of me felt at that moment. A kiss! On the lips! And she was kissing me back! Jerol, my best friend in the office, 17 years older than me! I didn’t really care about our age, I had come to trust her as my equal now. She was gentle at kissing, and soft, and her caresses now suddenly felt, instead of friendly, intentionally arousing. The magic of our moment was accentuated by a loud roar of thunder in the distance, followed by even heavier rain. She felt so soft and warm, I wanted to kiss and hug her, have her close to me, for a very long time. We embraced for several minutes before the rain and thunder got even heavier and she pulled me back into her house saying: “Come back in, you’re not going anywhere”.
No sooner had she closed the front door than I pulled her to me again and I kissed her again, this time with passion, wanting to fully savor her warmth. My hands on her back wanted her too, so they snuck their way under her top and found her soft skin warm and welcoming. I was already over-aroused at that point, but her expert fingernails managed to excite me even further with every inch of my skin that she scraped. It was around that time that I realized I wasn’t sure what would happen next – this was about as far as I had gotten in the past with a woman.
After a while of making out standing next to her front door, Jerol took the initiative and led me by the hand to her couch. I followed dazed, as in a dream, and when we reached the couch, I näively proceeded to kiss her on the couch again. She pushed me back, almost annoyed, then quickly took her shirt off. I looked at her, shocked, unbelieving, as she then took off mine. It was all so quick that I barely had time to absorb it: I was getting naked all the way together with Jerol, or rather, she was getting us both naked. Two seconds later she was looking at me devillishly as she took her cotton pants off, and while my eyes were stuck like glue to her crotch, she unbuckled my belt and sensually held my maximally-hard cock with her soft, cool hand, taking up all my willpower not to ejaculate right then and there. Just looking at her naked body had me almost over the edge, and then she spread out wide just for me. My mind could not hold it, I just followed suit, adopted a cross-leg position with her, and shakingly entered her as best I could.
And that was just way too much for my unexperienced body and mind. I burst out instants after grabbing my cock with my hand to prevent a messy spillage. And then, as I sat there panting, looking at us, I realized what I had just done: I had totally wasted a session of passionate sex and ruined a beautiful moment with Jerol, all by having zero experience on lovemaking. Overwhelmed and ashamed, I dared not look at her for a while, and just blurted “I’m sorry” over and over while looking down at the couch. She said “It’s ok”, but I knew she was disappointed – the excitement in her eyes and in her body had been evident just seconds before.
After cleaning myself up and making out some more on her couch, we decided it was late and that I should leave. We kissed some more on her porch and then she closed the door, but my mind did not stop reeling. I was dazed, overwhelmed, trying to absorb what had just happened. This beautiful, cool, smart woman, my best friend in Austin, 17 years older than I, really liked me and wanted me! I had liked her for some time now already, but in my experience, those feelings had virtually never been reciprocated.
I walked to my car slowly, absorbing the moment as much as I could, and then I looked up at the sky: the clouds were gone, and the stars were shining brightly. When struck with love, these natural displays always feel more intense. So I looked up at the stars for a long time that 7th of October, basking in the delight of the moment, thanking God for that beautiful moment, and thinking of nothing except Jerol.
We agreed for some reason that what happened that night was to be a one-time thing, and that we would only be friends from then onwards. And to prove it, we got together the very next night to watch some more movies. I cannot quite recall now why, but at that time I was convinced that it was not a good idea for us to become regular love partners. So after the kids went to sleep and we were watching our own movies, Jerol and I sat together on the couch a few inches apart, watching our own movie, with this huge sexual tension between us demanding to be broken.
Jerol knew better than I, and she began caressing my shoulder gently. I tried to resist at first, but quickly decided it was no use, and that maybe one more night would not be a problem. We had only begun making out on the couch when Jerol whispered “let’s go upstairs”. My eyes opened wide and my heart skipped a beat, and I followed her up, longing to hold her all the way.
My first night in the bedroom with her was wonderful. We kissed and caressed under a dim orange lamp light, slowly, exploring, gently allowing each other to move onto further patches of skin. Little by little, speaking through kisses, we took off each other’s clothes piece by piece. The warmth I stole from under her shirt with my sliding hands became a delicious furnace after I slipped the shirt over her arms, and I’ll never forget the feeling of ecstasy when we first embraced with naked chests. And after sampling the marble smoothness of her legs through under her waistband, rubbing them fully along with mine while lying on her bed felt like the best sensation in the world.
We made love that night as I will always remember. My pleasure was maxed out and I felt wonderful, yet I cared little for my own pleasure. All I wanted was to make her feel good, to give the best I had to this beautiful woman that had chosen to love me. I was certainly no expert, but I did know one thing: it’s always better when the man lasts longer (reason for which the previous night had been SO lame). So that was my one aim. I kissed and caressed her and rubbed her skin with mine, but I avoided entering her for as long as I could.
To do so, I proceeded to explore her lying body downwards, touching every inch of smooth skin as I went. I slided down my eyes to her neck to her shoulders and chest, then reached her gorgeous breasts and rubbed them, squeezed them, felt their warm skin to my face, tasted her nipple with the tip of my tongue, and then promptly, not able to resist, sucked on it fully.
I kept massaging her breasts for a while, but I felt she wanted me someplace else. I caressed her breasts downhill to her belly, found and pressed on her belly button on the way, then licked her skin down to her waist, where I purposely paused to keep her waiting for a moment. A few short breaths from her told me she couldn’t wait much longer, so I then dipped down between her legs and took my first good look at her sex.
Her pubic hair obscured most of it from plain view, but she had her legs spread out enough for me to discern her fleshy, moist lips. I looked at it for a few seconds, as I would with anything so new to me. Curious but not quite yet convinced, I blew warm air onto it, giving myself a few more moments to decide. Then I thought that I had made it this far... no reason not to take the final step, so I plunged my mouth fully onto her inviting crevice.
By the way her body reacted, it was the right thing to do. Her breaths, previously short and expecting, became longer sighs of pleasure, and her warm, soft body relaxed all over. I had little to no idea of what I was doing - all I knew was that licking was good, so that’s what I did, all over the place. With licking came tasting, and my first impression was that of “sour”. I don’t think I could accurately describe it... warm sour candy juice without any of the sugar and with a teensy bit of bitter, maybe. Commenting on it later, Jerol said it was an “acquired taste”. And I totally agree. At first I did not like it, but after surpassing an initial gag, I didn’t want to stop. And neither did she want me to – after her initial long sighs of pleasure, her breathing became faster and shorter, and the rhythm of her body accelerated. Her sighs became soft moans, her breaths louder gasps, as I pleased my own tongue with her flavor and her warmth. Further tonguing made her whole body shake, and I knew I should lick her faster. Faster and faster as she softly cried out, I loved the feminine sounds she produced, and brought her closer and closer to the edge. Her body vibrated, so fast did it shake, when her muscles suddenly tensed, and her short gasping moans became quick breaths, and I knew she was over the top. Her bare skin was tense and even warmer, and it felt great to rub her belly and breasts while I continued to lick her fast and hard.
She then pulled my head up, I wasn’t sure why, and managed to pant “Stop, stop, stop! I want you in me, quick!”. I wasn’t sure why she didn’t want me to continue, but the next step seemed like something I would enjoy. I slowly pulled myself up her body, rubbing her skin with mine as I went, but then she pulled me up impatiently. She couldn’t wait much longer. I saw her face again and kissed her, happy to see her again. She didn’t want to kiss then, though, so she quickly directed my cock to her entrance, and then I pushed my body into hers...
And her eyes opened wide and she took a deep breath as we joined both our bodies into one whole. I was almost at the point of orgasm myself, but then I remembered my one goal: to last as long as possible. I stopped myself deep inside her for a while, and mentally told my penis to block orgasm as long as possible. Then when it felt right, I just thrusted, and her body responded likewise to my moves.
I greatly enjoyed the feeling on my penis, warm and cozy and being rubbed just right. I tried to kiss her lips again, but she didn’t respond, so I thought it might not be the best time for that. Then as she pulled me in deeper, I held her back, and again felt the delicious warmth of her body mix with mine. Our heads side to side over our shoulders, I kissed her beautiful naked right shoulder as I smelled the heaven-like aroma of her long, wavy, lovely brown hair.
I observed her lovely face as she moaned – she looked even more beautiful with her closed eyes and her expression of pleasure. I realized that the cause for her pleasure was me, and that at that moment, even if only for that moment, I was to her what she was to me: everything. And I wanted to hold her, help her, protect her, for I felt a deep tenderness for this lovely being as we moved together in harmony. And then I loved her even more.
Our session that night remains a mark for me, for she climaxed again but I didn’t, despite my later strong efforts, so strongly had I conditioned myself. Her legs hurt at one point and we stopped, and I held her body close to mine as we huddled together and kissed under the covers. She seemed pleased, relaxed, and most importantly, happy. I softly kissed her cheeks, forehead, eyes, lips, neck, shoulders, and as our chests pressed together and her hot body brushed with mine, I had a taste of Nirvana.
“So much for ‘a one-night thing’”, I joked while winking at her. A small confidence boost for myself, Jerol had trouble believing me when I told her I had just spent my virginity with her. She said she thought I had gone all the way at least once with one of my previous girlfriends, but I had always ommitted the sexual details of my relationships in our conversations.
It would’ve been great to spend the whole night there and wake up together, to see her first smile in the morning and love her again. But her children were sleeping only a few rooms away, and this new part of our relationship was only for ourselves to know. So after enjoying each other’s company, warmth, and happiness for a while, we decided I should leave and I did, against the will of my whole body. We kissed countless times, not wanting to part, but time pressed me on and we finally said goodbye for that night. And when I was outside I looked up, and again, the sky was clear and the stars were shining, it seemed to me, much brighter and more beautiful than the previous night. And I thought of nothing except Jerol.
My visits grew more frequent, and so did my late-night stays at her house. On several occasions I woke up after dawn, surprised, fearful to keep our secret from her children. Those times I quickly dressed up and lay down at her couch downstairs, pretending to have spent the night there. But mostly, after holding each other for a while, I left her house and drove away, back to my apartment to catch a few last hours of sleep. But before getting in my car, I always looked up at the stars, remembering how it all had started, and thinking about how wonderfully it had all turned out. And even when clouds covered the stars or when it rained when I left her house, to me the stars always shone outside 8411.
Our relationship grew, of course, and we became much closer. By no means did our friendship suffer, though it was sometimes hard to hide our feelings of love under our mask for the public and, especially, for her children. Her children, beautiful for their own many virtues, also became close friends of mine. We shared many of their activities, from homework to movie-watching, and my heart turned every time I heard from Jerol how they missed me when I was out on deployments. I did my first Halloween trick-or-treat’ing together with them, I picked strawberries from a farm for my first time together with them, and I felt saturated with joy when they ran to me and hugged me just because they were happy to see me. As Jerol and I sometimes mentioned in our conversations, my experience with her and her children has been almost like that of having a family, with me playing the paternal role. It very well seemed so sometimes, and I feel very fortunate to have had them, if only for a while.
Hi Jerol. As I’m writing this, it is June 22nd, I’m still stuck in Russia, and I hope to see you again soon. When I think of you, I almost wish I had made my travel plans shorter. As with the letter I gave you several months ago, I won’t keep a copy of this after giving it to you – this is only for you to keep. I narrated what I remember about our encounter in several levels of detail, and I hope that you like it. I ommitted a few details, such as our chess games and our midnight trip to HEB, but I know you remember them as well as I .
I’m still deciding whether to send you this document when I connect to the internet again, or to give it to you personally when we see each other. In any case, I want to say that I love you very, very much. As I tried to describe in this document, my experiences with you have played a major role in my life, and I am very grateful to you for every single one of them, my dear angel Jerol. I miss you terribly, and I can’t wait to see you again.
Sending you my dearest love,
Antonio
