Near closing time on a rare, rainless Cornish evening, I wander toward the shop where you work, unable to explain how I got here other than transport by sheer longing. The same compulsion told me where to find you in this village across the sea.    

A display window's counterfeit moonbeams stripe the dark sidewalk in front of my destination. Tongue-tied with grief and hope, I push the door open and step under clean fluorescence. 

There's no one attending the counter; it's a relief to have another moment to muster my thoughts. Placards advertise sweet nostalgia in a pastel spectrum: Mint Mocha Chip, Raspberry Swirl, Cocoa Marshmallow. Relics from another lifetime. 

Like when your secret world found its long-lost twin in mine and exploded into a wonderland of white heat. You called it love. 

The enthusiasm with which you opened your heart after opening your belt swept me deeper and deeper into the fantasy until we blended at its core. Burned before, I flourished under your affectionate sun, even as I told myself you were too good to last.

A grizzled gent whose waistline shows regular indulgence in the Flavor of the Day materializes between me and the counter. Good. He can go first. It'll give me more time to form the questions that torment me with each phase of the moon.

The night's silver mistress was our tangible bond. Sometimes her brightest smiles stirred us from our dreams of one another, but we didn't mind. How could we, when our shared waking rode bursts of solar flares and flung us across the sky like shooting stars? 

Three euphoric months after those introductory emails, you confessed you wanted us forever. 

Will you be my cyber wife? 

My 'yes' rang from Cloud Nine. 

Forever.

You insisted we do it right. What a whirlwind of giddiness consumed us as we selected rings, bridal finery, and a wedding-night suite. To us, each night was a wedding night, only perfect. Still, we counted the days until our special one.

The first years flew by in an extended honeymoon. When work took you out of town, I greeted you with birthday-suit surprises in your hotel or guest quarters. When extended holidays knocked us offline, we fretted for each other's return until burner phones carried our kisses anytime we wished. 

When you moved to one of the UK's most scenic corners, we christened each room you renovated in your new flat. Plumbing, electrical, carpentry, your practical skills seemed as limitless as our joy at finding one another in this vast minefield called cyberspace. 

After you finished the house, we risked arrest for indecency in towers on the South West Coast Path and held hands like besotted tourists in every seafront idyll from Fowey to Falmouth.

You swelled with pride at my musical training and said the sweetest things when I sang your favorite tunes in and out of bed. 

From the street entrance, you appear. Handsome as I dreamed you'd be, though Len Whiting as Romeo exceeds expectations. No, not really. When I first heard your voice, its raspiness advanced your stated age. Yet through infatuation's filters, it seduced me with the thrill of stolen Verona evenings. 

Your expression is apologetic at keeping customers waiting, but your eyes remain a somber riddle as they brush me and move on. 

How could you recognize what you've never seen? 

But after nearly six years of soul-merging, how could you not know?

As the demands of offline life compressed our bubble, we opened different doors of intimacy and comforted one another through the slow decline and passing of those who meant the world to us. The faithful hound who woke you every morning so you could type an 'I love you, darling' before work. My great-granddad. Your mum. 

The pandemic brought an upside, however. Both our significant others moved closer to home. Tacitly, the warp and woof of our romance shifted to the friend zone. Yet we continued to sign off with 'your husband,' 'your wife,' and all our hearts. 

It's true I must be a sight: travel-ravaged, clothes crumpling over thinness. Only the curls, fierce in fledgling Esperanza flight, inspire confidence in the beauty you've attributed to me. You knew most of my hair had fallen out post-covid but not its triumphantly different return. It was me you loved, not my hair, you said.

"Hey, Ron," you greet the large chap first, followed by a fainter, "Hi..." that may or may not include the strange girl you see before you. 

Fresh disappointment spears my chest as I watch you walk by. Didn't your eyes recognize the kindred sorrow in mine? 

From behind the curve of glass and its rainbow-hued temptations, you chat with Ron while I wait nervously. Sugar and dairy are forbidden as long as I live, and this place is a shrine to both. I've no idea what to order, no ruse to fall back on if my courage fails. 

You're forbidden for me, too, which must be why you're here.

While your new engineering job brought more to celebrate — more responsibility, better pay — it reduced our togetherness from daily to weekends. Busier at my own work, I welcomed the change. 

Somewhere between the rehabilitation of damaged lungs and a dreaded new diagnosis, we backslid with the feverish abandon of a first tryst. It began with innuendo surrounding how to spend the fall clock change's extra hour. When I teased you no longer needed that side of me now that your girlfriend was living with you once more, Oh no, protested your impassioned reply. I never stopped wanting you. I'll always want you.

That word 'always' again.

At the estimated hour of my surgery, the boss noticed your preoccupation. You told me not to worry when the procedure and rounds of post-op treatments blunted physical drives. 

Just focus on getting well, darling. I'll be with you.

I love you.

And with the trust of the long-married, I drew healing strength from your reassurances.

Even as our sixth spring lengthened daylight hours, the letters grew shorter. You'd refused to call them emails. Too impersonal, you said. Yet on the brink of summer, without warning, they stopped. 

There wasn't even a birthday card. You'd never missed one before.

Fear for your well-being clotted my insides and bloodied my keyboard. 

She said she wished I wouldn't write to you, the monitor blinked after an interminable pause. 

You said you were sorry about the interim scan results and the second surgery that clouded my future. 

You said you were at work and couldn't continue the message for the tears and unwanted attention they were drawing. 

From the beginning — and only a few months before — we'd had her expressed approval. There was no explanation for what caused her sudden change of mind. 

Or was it yours? 

Was there a new light glowing on the other side of your screen, someone fresh and free from life's trials?

I watch you and Ron, ready for my turn, thoughts scrambling through their dress rehearsal. 

Whatever the reason, was it so easy for you to let us go? 

Does the login to nothingness cause you the same pain, or have you stopped trying so as not to violate the spirit of her new law? 

Did you already forget we ever happened? 

I contemplate the inevitable fate of voice recordings, photos and legions of messages we've left in our wake. Yes, I counted — and wept for the heaven that doesn't exist for so many endearments to go after they die. Without your presence, they're white noise and meaningless shapes on a page to be purged by an equally indifferent server someday.

Can't you see that your departure doesn't only affect me but everyone with whom I'm close? That you've cast shadows on their sentiments as well? For their sake, I need to know why. 

I need to know more. 

The older gent talks a streak. I can no longer see you, and it dawns on me you don't wish to be seen.

Discouraged, I slip out of the shop and into the darkness. Just as I quietly retreated from your life.

A tall, thirty-something redhead steps from a taxi; her embrace crushes me against her trenchcoat. Once released, I take in the almost manic glow of her features in the ambient street light: frosted pink lips shine as one with the shadowed lids and long, straight hair. 

"We've missed you and your husband so. You both must join us for dinner." Her accent is properly posh; a line of restoration marks her smile. 

I'm sure I've never met her. I doubt you have, either. Has our 'wedlock' pierced the virtual veil to the point where our material selves have been strolling the Cornish hills hand-in-hand, the envy of all passers-by? Have our doppelgangers collected a social circle of their own? 

Yes, we were that close. 

Were.

I choke back the pain of past tense and return her smile as best as confusion allows. "I'm sorry, but I'll be flying back to America tonight."

"Oh. Perhaps another time?" 

Her question, like mine, strikes an unresolved chord. Guiltily, I turn, bereavement compounded, at a loss for answers.

On the way to the airport, raindrops pelt my cheeks through the windshield. One for each of the thousands of I love yous that disappeared into a moonless forever.