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I watched her silently until she reached her house. Only then did she turn around. She turned back to me, and waved, happily so it seemed. Now we spoke those words that had been impossible to say for either of us, earlier. Those words rang loud and clear for all the world to hear them. "Have a wonderful life, Peter," she called back. Her words cut through the stillness and echoed in thought.
"I love you, Erica," I called back to her and waved. "Have a great life, too."
"I love you likewise, dearest," she replied in a happy voice and disappeared into her house.
It seemed that those happy sounding words were also the hardest words that were spoken that night. They even caused me to have some bitter regrets. I, too, have had the urge to call her, dearest. This would have been honest. Except, a deep lying fear stood in the way, that it would be misunderstood. This fear had blocked the admission. Consequently the admission was not made. Now the opportunity to do so was gone, possibly forever. I shuddered, realizing how sadly we had both failed to treat each other as human beings, even though we had moved so far, and so daringly. I felt a great sense of compassion at this moment for the whole of mankind that faced still greater challenges and greater obstacles. I felt this compassion, because two of mankind's most promising soldiers in its struggle for freedom and humanity had suddenly quit and thrown in the towel for the sake of one little thing.
The street suddenly felt emptier as I turned back to the car. It was emptier by one person. The world had become silent. I felt chilly in the night-breeze, though in my thoughts her warmth was still with me. I could feel the warmth of our last kiss and of our final embrace, and my desire to call her, dearest, which would now never be fulfilled.
I stepped back into the car and started to drive away. I drove away sadly. I should have been happy for this wonderful day that we had had together. That's when I shuddered at the thought that the most advanced thinker that I had encountered, with whom I had made a daring step forward into the realm of love, had found it nevertheless impossible to take the last step that would have challenged the world's conventions more fully and dethroned their poverty. I shuddered for realizing that if this daring pioneer and scientist, and I who had become rather daring myself, who were aware of the world's self-imposed poverty and its implications, couldn't free ourselves from its stranglehold, what chance did poor humanity have to do this with a much lesser scientific background? I realized that we had both succumbed to the world's ingrained poverty, to its near universal dishonesty, so that we both couldn't move honestly in respect to the truth in the final moments when it really counted for taking that one last radical step. Some heroes we were! She was right. Humanity is more than ignorant of its own focus on poverty, and I had to admit that I wasn't much farther out of that hole than she was, or everyone else.
That's why humanity doesn't see the riches that lie at its feet, I reasoned. Indeed, no one can see what lies outside one's field of vision? Erica was right on that point. She was right about so many things. I felt grateful eventually, as I drove back into town, for the miracle to have met her at all. I felt grateful for her sharing, and for the wondrous day that we have had together. In this way, gradually, the happiness that I had felt earlier, was finally breaking through again. I knew that the love she had shared would likely remain as an echo in my thoughts, and would slowly change my life. Higher perceptions do tend to have this effect. Yes indeed, I welcomed this effect. I was looking forward to its unfolding.
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