Reflection

I was 18 and it was a cold rainy night. It was the night of the senior prom, and for the sins of our predecessors, it was being held in the school auditorium instead of at the hotel which they had vandalised.

I spent a lot of time with her and her friends, in the gallery where we sat. My grandfather had introduced us. It was a time of hope; it was a time in which dark things were forever put behind. But I remember one specific thing - I liked her company, and our families were well-acquainted, but there was none of that feeling of... gravity.

Sometimes your heart weighs so much, feels so large with hope, fear, portent or despair. Sometimes it is full of blood, and at other times it is unbearably light with air. And sometimes, it is happy but it feels nothing beyond that. And that was how I passed the night.

It was the other one who greeted the new year with me a month later, when my head had been shorn in the service of my country.

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Years passed. I wrote many letters, something that feels somehow so archaic in this age of ubiquitous electrons. I kept their replies. I remembered them, even though my heart had gone on. She owns a restaurant. The other one is a teacher. And I look in that dark mirror of the past, and all I see is clean rain on an open road.