"I usually don't stare at lady's breasts to fall in love", said Peter, "it just happens. Either one." "And, apart from that, love and sexual attractiveness are two different things, which you women will of course never understand." Paula frowned as if to turn into an XX-chromosome monster prepared to vanquish once and for all this outrageous indication of a resistence to female superiority, completely disregarding his first sentence as a sign of anything meaningful. The monster was mock on the surface, however, and they both knew it (even though he knew it's mock on the surface only, which she didn't know he knew). He smiled. She smiled back the little-girl way.
While leaving the bar for the snowy streets of this lovely Central European city, they felt wonderful. It's been years since they were just friends. It's been years too since they had to say to each other what their relationship really meant for them. Paula was happily engaged with a high-ranking salesman. Peter was a quite respected non-aligned journalist, living in a small attick apartment in the very center of the city. They both lead a life that an average middle-class young people in their late twenties would lead: not too much money yet, but not broke either; old enough to approach things with only (or already) mediocre seriousness but still too young to appreciate the peacefullness of conventions learnt by centuries.
Forgiveness is an amazing phenomenon. In fact, no one forgives in the sense of intentionally forgetting. Forgiving actually means learning to live with what is happening or had happenned in the past. Forgiving does not require understanding, tolerance is sufficient. One could possibly voluntarily change the automatic nerve impulse paths in the brain by constant inflow of new experience. This practice however cannot be referred to as forgiveness because it involves memory ignorance or deletion if you want, not tolerance. It's been years since Peter forgave Paula. And here I do not mean the forgiveness of the classical style - Paula just didn't do anything wrong really. One could say it was the forgiveness of the rare enlightenment type where one learns to love someone in a seemingly unlimited limitedness of a relation called friendship.
