If I had known dinner was going to come with a marriage proposal, I would have worn a tie.
I still don’t know what to think, much less what to feel. A beautiful young woman asked me tonight — just a few minutes ago — if I would marry her, but it was more like a business proposal or a marriage of convenience.
Kayla is 28 years old. (That’s not her real name, of course.) I’ve known her — not well enough to marry her, though — for about 10 years. She’s beautiful. She’s highly intelligent. She’s talented. And she has a great heart.
But shortly after college, things went terribly wrong in her life. She had family tragedies which she never imagined. And then she had to face personal demons — things none of us saw coming — which threatened to destroy her for good.
I hadn’t seen Kayla for five years. She ended up homeless at one point and I ran into her by chance at the worst of that crisis. She spent one night with me, but I lost track of her again after that. And then she asked to see me tonight.
We’re neither friends nor enemies, just strangers who share the past
‘This path leads to somewhere I think I can finally say, I’m home’
When love finally dies, it’s like a fever breaks and the pain is gone
