The Present

Dennis and I had been poor. As poor as the dirt on the ground. Yet we were rich in love with each other. We were married for fifteen years. I was thirty when we married, and he was a few years older.

 

Then one fateful spring day over a year ago everything changed. Like everything. Literally. In order to explain how I got to where I am today, I kind of need to back up a bit.

 

You see, I’ve always considered myself bisexual. I do lean more toward women, but Dennis was such a spectacular man that we were exclusive during our entire time together. Despite our devotion to one another, he knew I was bi, and he had no problem with it. He knew I sometimes flirted with women online but that was as far as it went.

 

Emilie was one of those women I sometimes flirted with just for fun. I met the tall slim blue-eyed accountant with the caramel-colored hair on a language learning site. The German native helped me learn some of her language. I’ve always had a fondness for languages in general. ASL, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese… Studying languages was my passion.

 

For five years we maintained a close cyber relationship until we got into an argument. I felt like Emilie was being overly judgmental and it was really getting to me. She would complain more and more about so many things from the way I lived my life, the things I believed, the things I bought.

 

Just to piss her off after we cut ties with each other, I befriended some of her friends and ended up actually developing real friendships with two of them. She wasn’t happy about that at first but eventually, she accepted it.

 

Emilie lived in Munich. One of her friends, Rona, which she met when she lived in New York for a few years working on Wall Street, was a former au pair from Austria.

 

The other friend lived in Leipzig. That would be Isabel. Isabel was very different than Rona, who would also be dumped by Emilie as well. Because Emilie was so picky and judgmental, she mostly dumped Rona because she was fat, frumpy and not very attractive. She didn’t give a shit about the fact that she had a very pleasant personality.

 

Isabel was just the opposite of the blue-eyed blond Rona in appearance. Isabel was a stunning dark-eyed slender beauty with raven hair. She was tall and fit, and a former belly dancer turned cab driver. She was aging, but even in her early fifties, she was very attractive.

 

Isabel was aware of the fact that my friendship with Emilie fell through, but we kept in touch just the same, swapping messages on Facebook periodically.

 

When Isabel learned that I lost my husband in a tragic accident and wasn’t sure what I was going to do with myself and my life at that point, she suggested I fly from our apartment in Los Angeles to her home in Germany for a visit while I figured it all out.

 

At first I just laughed at the idea. It just didn’t seem practical for me to suddenly jump on a plane and soar off to the other side of the world to stay with someone I’d never actually met face-to-face. Not to mention that it was a place that spoke a language I wasn’t fluent in.

 

But everyone had to do something crazy at least once in their life, right?