Photo reblogged via The View From Here.

Continued from A Transatlantic Love Story, Part VI.

My time in England was dwindling. He would graduate that June and move to Norway. I would go back to Ohio for one more year of my bachelor’s and then apply to Northwestern for journalism. I was a writer and no one was going to stop me from finding my way into print. He was a filmmaker, and no one was going to stop him from filming the places that caputured his heart. We prepared ourselves for some sort of goodbye by planning one more adventure.

The twinkling emerald waters of Positano, Italy formed little peaks of sinking hearts. The apricot sun kissed his nose with brown and blotched me with freckles. We ate outdoors in the warm night air by candlelight, getting too drunk on wine to calculate the correct tip in lire, and stopped—like true Italians—to kiss in public on the evening walks back to our room. He played me Brazillian jazz from his walkman while I told him about the books I’d write. We rented a boat and he taught me how to say “snowflake” in Norwegian. On our last morning, I woke him.

“I’m going swimming just one last time,” I whispered. His skin already glistened with the early morning heat.

“Do you mind if I don’t go?” His head barely lifted from the pillow.

“No.” I lied. “I’ll be back within the hour.”

The steps to the beach wound down through the tiny seaside town. I felt simultaneously happier than I’d ever been and possibly the saddest. I couldn’t lose him and yet I was. I couldn’t follow him to Norway. I had to finish my degree and, even afterwards, what would I do in Norway? Except love him, which I wanted to believe would be enough but couldn’t. I padded across the ashy gray sand speckled with green pebbles of smoothed down glass, spread myself out across the water on my back, and looked up at the pink and yellow houses dotting the coast. I wanted to stay there forever, but only had two hours. All of these thoughts were rushing through me when I suddenly felt two hands below me. They flipped me over into them with the oncoming wave, and he scooped me into his arms.

“I couldn’t let you go alone,” he said, dipping his head down to kiss the cold salt water on my lips. “I thought I’d just sit on the beach. Then walking down I saw you floating on the water like a star and I couldn’t resist catching you.”

No one had ever followed me anywhere before. As far back as I could remember, if I wanted to do something, I always had to go it alone. No one followed, but he did.

By the time the plane touched down in London, we’d decided that he would study film in New York the next year and I’d fly out as regularly as I could to see him. That was the plan, and the plan was so wonderful that I stood kissing him for much too long at Heathrow airport and almost missed my flight. I cried most of the eight-hour journey home, but I knew for certain that I’d see him again.