Day 43: The Story of Franny and Garp.

The Summer of '82.

I have been in love with exactly one man. We saw each other off and on for eight years, despite never living in the same city, and I wanted to marry him. We broke it off for good on August 1, 1990, and I've only seen him twice since. The first time was during his airport layover at LAX in 1992.

The second time was this morning.

We met the summer after our freshman year of college, when we were counselors at a camp in the Colorado mountains (go Yellow Tribe!). He ran the ropes course and I ran the stables (the most popular activities), and since everyone knew we were a couple, that pretty much made us the king and queen of camp. There was no place else I wanted to be, and no one else I wanted to be with. We spent the summer making love under the stars, and it was magic.

In the fall, we were back at our respective colleges, suddenly separated by 1,500 miles. I ached for him, and phone bills were high. We went to camp again the next summer, and then, for the next six years, we continued to see each other inbetween other relationships (his) and one-night stands (mine). We called each other Franny and Garp after characters created by one of our favorite authors (John Irving), and when we were apart, we told each other to "keep passing the open windows" (a line from The Hotel New Hampshire). We called our relationship "the never-ending conversation." I was madly in love.

It all came to a head in the summer of 1990. He was in graduate school four hours away (for us, that was close), we were both 27 years old, and I knew he was The One. He wasn't so sure, and I was clueless as to the the reason behind his hesitation. Apparently, we could talk for hours about every topic under the sun except one: Us. He didn't bring it up because, well, he's a guy, and as for me, I was too scared to rock the boat. It was as if I thought that calling attention to our relationship might break the spell he was under. He might suddenly wake up and say, "How did this happen? What am I doing here?"

Instead, I filled in the blanks myself. Deep down, I knew why he didn't want to commit: It was my weight. It was those 25 extra pounds, the same pounds that always seemed to ruin everything. Plus I wasn't hot enough - he'd always had beautiful women falling at his feet. How could I compete?

When I finally walked away in 1990, I was bitter. I blamed him for being shallow, for not knowing what he wanted, for not loving me enough. We started communicating again a couple of years later, and that led to Reunion #1 at the airport bar in '92. He was on his way to teach at a university in New Zealand, and was in love with the woman who would later become his wife and the mother of his children. I was also in love with a woman - my first girlfriend, whom I'd met six months after he and I ended things.

Our communication has been sporadic since that last meeting, but we've never completely lost touch. And so, when I started this experiment, I sent him the link, and he's been a faithful reader from Day One. When he knew he'd be in L.A. for another layover (this time with his family, traveling back to New Zealand), he wrote to let me know. And so, despite my fear at him seeing me this heavy, I went to have breakfast at their hotel this morning.

He hasn't changed at all. It's really quite remarkable ... and vaguely maddening. He met me in the lobby carrying his eight-month-old (yeah, that took a minute to get used to), and we went to the hotel restaurant to grab a table and talk. Small talk. A short while later, his wife and three-year-old came down to join us. We asked questions about each other's lives, and it was all very pleasant.

Afterwards, he and I went out to have coffee on our own, and that's where the real conversation began.

Finally, neither one of us was afraid of the conversation we'd always avoided. We reminisced about our relationship, smiled at our chemistry, admitted that we'd both wondered more than once what might have been had we decided to get married. And then, finally, we got to the $64,000 question: Why? Why, in the end, had he held back?

His answer blew me away. "I've thought about this a lot," he said. "And I guess, well, I was afraid to be myself with you sometimes. I was scared you saw me as this person, you know, up here, when I really existed somewhere down here. I didn't think I could live up to who you thought I was. I was scared you expected me to be, I don't know ... Garp."

This from a man who turned down his family's money and put himself through college? A man who earned an advanced agricultural engineering degree ... and then joined the peace corps? A man who later turned down any number of fat-cat corporate jobs to instead try and design a cheap well cap that would stop dysentery?

To say I'm still shell-shocked as I write this would be an understatement. I spent the day in disbelief, precariously close to tears, struggling with the fact that I'm an idiot. Never in a million years would I have guessed that the reason had anything to do with him. I'd always filtered our relationship through the prism of my own insecurities; I'd always blamed myself. To know, after all this time, that the problem was something we might have been able to work through if we'd only talked about it ... that it had nothing to do with my physicality ... well, it's both heartening and crushing. I mean, it's nice to know it wasn't that stuff, but at the same time, it kind of makes me want to bang my head against a wall.

Yesterday, I mentioned the movie Brokeback Mountain, and how its themes of wasted chances and missed opportunities reverberated loudly for me. Seeing this man from my past today - the only man I've ever truly loved - was bittersweet. It made me wonder how much of my life I've misread - even sabotaged - thanks to that same stupid prism.

I don't want to do that any more. I want to take that prism and smash it into a million little pieces. And if this experiment helps me accomplish that, well, it's the smartest thing I've ever done in my life.