Regina never really left my life.

We just weren’t together in the way the world understands it.

After those early years—those intense, impossible, formative years—she moved in and out of my life the way certain people do when they are no longer part of your daily world, but remain part of your structure.

She came to my graduation at Cranbrook.

She was there for the crucifixions—and through her, my angel was there too.

She was there at the New Museum, standing with me as Plato’s Cave lit up two blocks of Broadway—watching something we could barely have imagined in those early days take form in the world.

She stood in the rooms at MIT when I finally had something to show—work that had grown out of everything I had lived through. She saw it not as something new, but as something that had always been there. She knew what I didn’t.

Years later, she traveled with my mother and me to Ireland, when we attempted to make art with an early robotic system. She was there for all of it—and later, watching eight giant water spiders swarm up the Providence River, she was there for that too.

She appeared at the edges of my life like that—unexpected, but somehow always fitting.

One of the reasons we drifted apart was simple.

With her encouragement, I went to art school. And then further—to Cranbrook. My life began to take shape in ways that required a different kind of focus, a different kind of presence.

We didn’t end.

We just moved onto different paths.

Somewhere along the way, I lost track of her.

I’ve tried to find her. Looked through records, even the obituaries.

She’s not there.

So I tell myself she must still be alive.

Over time, I stopped trying to understand what she had been in my life, or what we were supposed to become.

What we had didn’t resolve into anything I could name.

What matters now is harder to describe.

These things happened. I do not question that. And yet, returning to them now, I find they have loosened from the ordinary claims of memory and taken on another form. Not invention—something else. A kind of persistence that resists explanation.

Not only the girl I loved, but the way she kept appearing across the architecture of my life—at Cranbrook, at MIT, at the New Museum, at the river’s edge watching impossible machines move through the water.

She was there when my art was still becoming itself.

She saw patterns in me before I could see them on my own.

Perhaps this is what we call myth—not a departure from reality, but a transformation of it. Events that, having lived long enough within us, no longer submit to proof, only to recognition.

I offer her here as she comes to me now: not corrected, not resolved, but held in the shape she has chosen.

I was born in love with her.