"That was the times in which I was born --in the darkness of the most brutal war, and the dawn of mankind's greatest dreams. I was born far, far from the battlefields of Europe; in a town called Evanston, on the Lakefont ten miles north of Chicago, a beautiful part of the country lined with trees and sandy beaches where the cold waters of the Lake lapped. My mother was a professor at Northwestern University; my father a violinist and painter who did his work from home." She smiles. "I was very, *very* lucky growing up -- very lucky, really, my whole life. My parents loved me very much, and I was always surrounded by books and learning from the time I was very young. I still remember skipping through the stacks at Deering Library, or running a kite along the lakeshore, or watching the sailboats make out to sea from the marina at the end of the ship channel, under the shadow of the great white dome of the Bahai temple. Evanston was a good place to grow up..." Alex pauses, considering where to go next. "It can be the little things that can become the most hurtful." She pauses again. "It was a letter, a simple little, handwritten letter on plain white college-ruled paper. It came when I was fourteen. It just appeared one day in the mailbox." "It was a letter from a boy a few years older than me. He was living in Pittsford, NY, a small village on the banks of the Erie Canal. He liked books and music and poetry, and wanted to be my pen-pal, and hoped I would write back." "Well, not *my* pen-pal, since the letter wasn't addressed to me. It was addressed to a girl named Constance --which was my *last* name, not my first. Perhaps he meant the people who lived in the home before I did --that made the most sense as to why I recieved it, even though I had never requested a pen-pal." "We had no idea what had become of the people who had lived in our home before us, and no way of forwarding the letter. But the boy was so sweet, and so funny, and so good-natured I felt bad about just letting it drop, so I wrote a letter back to him explaining the mistake and apologizing for the trouble." "The following Tuesday I got a letter back from him." She pauses again. "It took almost four years before I met him in person...by which time we were exchanging letters on virtually a weekly basis. Cards. Little gifts. Big ones. We were good friends by the close of that first summer...and boyfriend and girlfriend by postal correspondence." She smiles. "We were an Internet couple long before there *was* an Internet. I knew him inside and out, his every thought, his every dream, and he mine, even without a word exchanged. I suppose we could have called, or even met before we did, but there was something..." "...I think we were both afraid that seeing or hearing each other would spoil the fun, shatter the dream, that somehow we wouldn't quite be what we expected when we met in person. That's why we didn't even exchange pictures. We had a good thing going that we didn't want to spoil with reality..." "Eventually, he went to college. Everyone warned me that things happen when you go to college... the rush of meeting new people, the freedom of being away from home for the first time; people change. I refused to believe. And indeed, the letters kept coming, now with Boston postmarks instead of Rochester...telling of life out there, the swirl of classes and events; I was enchanted. I didn't want the dream to end..." "Then the letters stopped suddenly." "The letters had been coming every six days, almost like clockwork --I'd write to him, three days later he'd write back to me, back and forth. One day, in late May of my senior year of high school, the next letter didn't arrive. I told myself it was just a delay in the mail --but a week passed and nothing. I wrote him again. The letter came back undeliverable. I wrote again. I even called Cambridge-West for information, but they refused to give it to me. Nothing. He had dropped literally off the face of the Earth." She sighs. "I'm sure you've suffered greater losses in your life. Certainly in the big picture, it was a tiny thing. But to me, this sweet young boy to whom I had given my heart, who had written every week for *four years*...to suddenly just up and disappear like that..." "He promised he would never do that. And I *believed* him!" "Everyone builds a little mental picture of their world. To have someone suddenly rip your dreams and your fantasies out from under your feet...you fall hard, *hard*." "I didn't go to prom. I went to graduation --I had to, I had to give the speech-- but my heart just wasn't in it. Everyone else was excited about graduating from high school and moving on, and by all rights I should have been, too. Going on to Cambridge at Boston was no minor accomplishment for a high school senior in the Concordat...but to go to Boston now...was maybe more than I could handle. I tried to put up a brave face on it, but inside I was coming apart, bit by bit, surrounded by all my friends who had their boyfriends by their sides and me whose Prince Charming had dissolved back into thin air. Backstage, I couldn't take it any more. I had to get out --I fled to one of the dressing rooms and just started to cry." "I heard my father calling after me, out in the hallway, but I didn't care. I heard the door open, my father's voice calling again, then a silence. The sound of feet, and a hand on my shoulder. I knew my father meant well, but I was in no mood to be comforted by my father --I batted his hand away angrily--" " 'Forgive me, m'lady,' he said." Alex pauses for a breath. "It wasn't my father who was kneeling there." "He was dressed in a highly rumpled dress uniform -- Army Cadet grey, saber at his right, the crossed swords and rifle of the Royal Army on his breast, his Inci off-kilter in his pocket, his ribbons on his chest...including the minature of the Star of St. George, second highest of the decorations for Valor the Concordat has." "And one of my letters --my last letter to him-- clutched in his hand." Alex smiles. "It was James, of course. *My* James. My Knight in shining armor, come all the way to Evanston for me. He was handsomer than I dared imagine, strong, but gentle, kind, compassionate...more perfect than I ever dreamed..." "Well, that's in retrospect. Really he looked like hell," she grined. "Black eye, barely-healed scars, his white dress gloves lumpy from where the bandages were underneath. Heck, one arm was in a sling! His hair under his half-crushed cap was a mess and one ear bandaged up bad --but he was James, *my* James, real and in person..." "If I thought I was in love with him before, it was nothing compared to what happened now. And somehow," she says with wonder, "he fell just as in love with me. Which, really, should have surprised neither of us, since we already knew each other better than most husband and wives ever do..." "We must have looked like quite the couple --me with tear-soaked, mussed up graduation gear, him looking like he just crawled off the battlefield --which, in fact, was what he had just done!" "Some weeks before, he had been preparing for a calm summer of drill and research --you see, he was a Cadet at Castle Island-- the Concordat's highest Military Academy, a campus of Cambridge- West itself. He was training to become an Army Officer...which is why they pressed him into service when they needed someone who spoke Bangathi --an extremely obscure dialect of Bantu-- fluently, which he did, from his family, which had escaped from Africa when he was just a baby. Being just about the only Army officer handy who did-- even just an officer in training-- he was pulled aside to help break coded communications the Concordat had recieved at its peacekeeping operations in South Africa...apparently, Concordat Intel had concluded EurCon was trying a variation on the Fourth Pan-Euro War use of Navajo code-talkers with Bangathi. James might have been one of the only uniformed speakers of that language in the Concordat! They gave him ten minutes notice before he was on a transport to England. Then when he got there, there was some kind of problem and the powers that be changed their minds again and decided to send him straight down to the refugee base down in Capetown rather than wait to bring the captured code-talkers up here and off he went." "Of course, what was supposed to be nothing more than a simple fly there-fly back went all to hell when EurCon-backed terrorist forces decided to overrun the Capetown Free States. The Concordat peacekeepers down there, including James, decided they didn't think becoming hostages was such a swell idea and so decided to fight their way out." "Obviously, this whole turn of events didn't exactly leave him the time to let me know he was going to be out of letter contact for a little while..." "Somewhere, during the whole bloody chaos of resisting against ten-to-one odds long enough to get all of the civilian aid workers in one place, and somehow finding himself in charge after the more senior officers were killed, commandeering EurCon transport planes at gunpoint and flying said civilian escapees the heck out of Dodge, he decided that if he ever got out of that alive he was going to come straight out and see me --he wasn't going to risk dying again without ever having met me. And after he and his troops, and the civilians they had rescued crash- landed on Mauritius --after desparately convincing the RAF there *not* to shoot them down-- and were flown on to London, where the High King himself met the airplane and made James a Knight of the Order of St. George right on the spot, when His Majesty asked James if there was anything he could do for James, James had answered instantly " 'Please get me to Chicago, your Majesty.' " Alex smiles. "Do you know how that makes a girl feel to be wanted like that?" "The newspapers found us out of course --the story was too good to let go. Not that James or I really cared. They say that relationships built on intense experiences don't last --but ours were built on far more than that... we each had a trunk full of letters to prove that point. They gave James the summer off after that whole episode, and he spent it with me in Evanston...he helped me move to Boston..." Alex smiles, remembering a hundred different memories. "We were married just a few years later. Ten years to the day his second letter arrived." [to be continued]