None of this would be possible, or even thinkable, without Jonathan, of course. He is not only my one true love, but also my oldest and dearest friend.

We met at the beginning of our first year of college. He was a friend of my roommate and I remember liking him right from the start. There was something indefinable that was very appealing about him.

First we were friends for a long time. Then we dated for a while and then we broke up and lost touch with each other. He went off and married an Italian woman who was the source of his sons and also of the Italian citizenship that makes our whole international adventure so much easier, bureaucratically speaking. I went off and had my two little boys on my own.

And then one day, after 15 years of absence, I heard from him again -- an email out of the blue. He was living in Switzerland, his marriage over. He was thinking of me. I had been thinking of him.

But I was just about to leave for the South Pacific -- a year away on a tiny island. We saw each other once before I left, a flying visit of less than a day. And then I went to Rarotonga with my two little boys and my one carry-on suitcase.

If you have a globe and you put one finger on Raro and one on Zurich, you will see that the entire Earth is between your fingers. It is impossible for two people to be further apart without leaving the surface of the planet and heading out into space. And on Raro, I had only very occasional access to the internet or a telephone. Both were ruinously expensive.

So we wrote letters to each other. I would sit on the veranda of our ancient and rambling house by the sea, shaded by palm trees and summer tipani and guavas, while the boys played together in the garden and the surf murmured at the end of the lawn (or at night, sweating, under the yellow light bulb that hung from the ceiling and the summer rain pounded down outside, watched over by the lizards called mokos who clung to the walls, still and curious) and write letters to him that would takes weeks and weeks to arrive. And he, in the northern hemisphere winter, icy and white and antiseptic in Switzerland, was meanwhile writing to me. 

We fell in love in those letters and longed for each other, so far away. I have them all here now, tied together with a ribbon in a bundle.

That was 20 years ago. I left my little island paradise and moved with the boys to Switzerland. Some people thought -- and said to my face -- that I was insane. We got married there and eventually came back here.

And I am still desperately in love with him. It has been years and years now and every day I am amazed that I have managed to be so lucky. It would have been so easy for the world to come between us -- the world was literally between us -- so many chances for us to just miss each other by a hair's breadth. But instead, he is here now, so near that I can hear him breathe. He has already made me laugh so many times this morning, already made me swoon. All I want, for the rest of my life, is to be near him.

And so we will go off on our next adventure together. We are always happy when we travel together. But then, we are always happy when we stay home, too.