The love of my life got married on January 16th. Nope, not to me. While the rational, grown-up side of me is very happy for him, the rest of me felt physical pain when I read the news. My heart actually hurt. His new wife is six months pregnant, and he is reading up on how to take care of an infant and how to raise a smart child. They have felt the baby move and are making room for a nursery.

The door is officially closed. It took ten years, but now it’s over. I think it would have been easier if I were the one who closed it.

When I met Yang I believed that love could conquer all things. Perhaps that would be true if we went through life only loving one person at a time. But I also love my family, and my mother is the most important person in my world. When I was little there was a time when she didn’t want to live. She stayed alive for me. She made so many sacrifices for me. I guess that Yang is the sacrifice I have made in return. She had such a hard time when I was gone for just a year that I couldn’t bear the thought of telling her I was going to build a life on the other side of the world.

The irony is that when I left for Taiwan, her one piece of advice to me was not to fall for a Taiwanese native because they would probably only be using me to get a greencard. Why was it then that I had to choose the one guy in Taiwan who had no interest in coming to the US? Actually, I wouldn’t have it any other way because one of the things I loved most about Yang was that he cared for his family as deeply as I care for mine. On top of that, he is culturally bound and obligated as the only son to take care of them for the rest of his life.

Even though they spoke no English and no Chinese, and I spoke no Taiwanese, his parents did truly care for me, as I did for them. His mother, who only had one year of formal schooling, even dictated a letter to me welcoming me to their family. When Yang made his first trip off the island to visit me in the US, my parents also embraced him.

But in the end, we always came up against the same wall. While I have missed him all these years, it has been tolerable because, however irrational, the possibility of us somehow one day finding a way was still there. Now that the possibility is gone, I feel such emptiness.

The hardest thing is knowing that he still feels the same way. I know he loves his new wife, but not in the way he loved me. I know that I will always have a place in his heart. In our last phone conversation a couple of months ago he reminded me of the Chinese story of two lovers separated from one another. They had to wait sixteen years before the gods allowed them to meet again. He said that he used to think that sixteen years was such a long time, but then he realized that ten years had gone by for us already. He is Buddhist and hopes that in our next lives we will meet again. While I am not Buddhist, there is a part of me that believes that this wasn’t our first meeting. I don’t know if you have ever had this experience, but when I first laid eyes on him, I felt as though I had known him forever. Since then, boyfriends have come and gone … and I loved them all. But never before and never since have I felt that kind of exquisite magic.

When I left Taiwan for the last time in March of 1995, I gave Yang a card that had an ancient Chinese idiom written inside … “Until the mountains crumble and the seas dry up” … the words and the sentiment are as true today as they were all those years ago.