Twenty-Five hours

I'll see you on the other side of the border, he promised her.

Months of preparation and scrimping and saving finally was here. Pen pals for years and a love now spoke for was coming to reality. The late night marathon chats about what they'd do when he arrived and the endless plans for a future together. The ocean's vast expanse now seemed reduced to a 25 hour plane ride. His smile on video chats would now be face to face.

She decided nothing in her closet would do for this first meeting. She drove in her beat up Chevy to the local mall and scoured the racks for the perfect outfit and finally brought a cheap little blue dress with lace inserts and white pumps. She raced home to watch time crawl. She knew sleep would elude her.

Would he even like her? She tried on the dress and shoes and walked around the apartment touching things, trying to imagine their first meeting and stopping to check her appearance in the mirror.

She sat by her phone nervously checking it for confirmation that he had boarded.

It came in a text, "We are boarding, Bella. I am coming to see you."

Her tears were hot as they slid down her cheeks. Twenty-five hours more...just twenty-five long, crazy hours to wait....

Backstory

This is an imaginary story I thought of many times years ago after falling for a wonderful man in New Zealand. In our many late-night chats our friendship bloomed into an honest love. I dreamed of meeting him because he was going to come and visit family in New Jersey. Suddenly he became ill and although he was released from the hospital and started to get better he took a turn for the worse and ended back up in the hospital. His sweet daughter knew about us and would communicate with me and his other online friends through a website that was once an app on Facebook called Human Pets. His name was Enrique. He went by Tauriq. My heart skipped a beat everytime I saw that he was online and we would trade beautiful images and talk about music and about his life there and mine here. I had even decided that if things developed I would move to New Zealand. My children were grown but he had still two young children to raise. He had two beautiful young daughters and an adult daughter named Monique.

Before he passed away he sent me an email and told me how much he loved me and how thankful he was that he had met me. He promised that he would get well and finally meet me as we both dreamed.

One of the saddest days of my life was going online to Facebook and finding out that he had passed away. It's no way to find out that somebody you care deeply for is gone and although I was never able to meet him or hold him, I could not deny the strong feelings that I had for him and it took a long time for me to move on. His memory will live on in my heart forever.

This is my 5 minute freewrite.
Here is the link for today.
see you on the other side

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art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics

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