Ineluctable

I attended the burial of our affair when I found the notebook-maybe it should be called her diary-she had  foolishly forgotten, leaving it on the deck of my beach house where she stayed while I was on that short trip to Chicago and I was numbed at first, unsure how to proceed and during the next couple of days my mind was infected with the soundtrack and images from that early seventies “The Way We Were” movie which is about two desperate people who seem to have a brilliant romance until their political views and convictions drive them apart and our affair almost perfectly mimicked that film with a similar theme in that we also gave each other our undivided affection until politics entered, immediately imploding our moods with her endearing “honey” quickly becoming “Nazi” or something equally as cruel and my rejoinder was usually something as bad, neither of us willing to relinquish our deep down views and finally, though trying to disbelieve, I knew she did not forgetfully leave her diary, it was her way of saying goodbye.