Welcome back.

After two years and two months, I finally get to see you again in the company of others. The atmosphere is welcoming albeit a certain tension roils beneath the fragile smiles and distant touches.

The room only gets warmer with a glimpse of your smile, and after all this time, I can't help but smile back at the stretch of your lips as the room eases with the sign that it's okay, let's smile and put this behind us. You always had a way with a room full of people.

And my heart warms, my chest expands with mirth and relief that after this time, you are still the same person I knew sixteen years ago. My heart constricts, my chest tightening with the thought, that after all you've been through, you're still putting people before you.

But as I watch you, slowly work around the room, reassuring, reaffirming, solidifying and even perhaps building and rebuilding people's faith in you. I know, without much thought or observation, that you're not really the same.

You're thin, thinner than the last I saw you, a far image from the videos of our tours and interviews that I kept watching just to see you, you are thinner--a reminiscence of not-so-due-to-growth-spurt thinn