We spend many hours building walls around our hearts and souls. We protect ourselves by taking an off-handish or blasé attitude towards the relationships we share with our friends, our family, and those we love.

When it comes to people with whom we have more formal relationships, shaped by the structure and propriety demanded by a workplace, a church or a social club, it is easy to let that structure or formality act as a protective wall, separating us from others. There are times, however, when we are forced to confront our feelings, or when feelings that we weren’t sure we had are allowed to express themselves.

The moment of epiphany can come at an unexpected time.

Perhaps it is a moment of parting at the airport, while you’re ensconced in the cool transient feel of the departure lounge while you see a dear friend off. You smile and hug, and you feel her skin feather your cheek. Your ear brushes her ear, and you feel their shoulders, thin and delicate in the crux of your embrace.

At that moment, something clicks in your mind and you comes alive. You feel a surge of feeling and a rush of warmth ripples up the nape of your neck. You feel electricity spark across your cheek. Your eyes dilate momentarily. Your loose embrace breaks up and she impishly says goodbye, perhaps with a wave, as she walks up to the gate. You watch her hair bob up and down slightly as she walks, and then you see a final flash of her eyes, as she turns her head to smile at you before disappearing through the customs gate.

You’re thunderstruck, although you remain standing quietly, no visible difference in your demeanour for the people rushing around you – the kids bouncing off their parents, the elderly woman waiting patiently by her walker for her daughter who has run to the washroom for a moment.

To them, you are unchanged – an impeccably dressed man with a fancy haircut, slim in your pea coat, your sunglasses balanced over your forehead. But they are wrong. They do not feel what you feel. For, at that precise moment, somewhere between the brush of her ear against yours and her last warm smile – flashed in a rearward glance – something has changed in your heart.

Suddenly you’re filled with wistfulness, longing for moments that hadn’t happened between you, your mind empty because your heart is full of the sorrow at the thought that she might find someone during her journeys, that she may come back changed, that this feeling may not be reciprocal.

You don’t know how long you stand there – it may be minutes or an hour.

Finally you jolt back into reality, and start to walk back to your car, your mind in a haze, your walk like a dream. You realise that you’ve been given something precious by your friend, whether or not it is reciprocal, whether or not you will ever communicate it to her, whether or not you or she will ever act on it.

You realise that you should be glad to feel the wrenching emotion in your heart, and as you walk in the dusky sunlight to your car, you realise you are lucky. You are lucky to have shared moments with her, known her. For she has given you a great treasure. She has given you the gift of love.

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