Some Old Wounds Take Longer to Heal
Keeping your feelings to yourself doesn't help anyone
My husband’s high school reunion was three months away.
As he scanned through the personal updates and pictures received from some of his old classmates, he reminisced about those four years of adolescent hopes and expectations.
Occasionally, he shared a memory or two with me — the Saturday trips to Senator’s Wash, wishing he could play guitar as well as Bill Painter, and still being clueless over how he managed to receive an “A” in Algebra.
Then he pulled out his high school annual and began paging through it. As his thoughts skipped from one year to the next — and from person to person — he occasionally paused on a picture to mention the class they shared or something they had in common.
His pauses were longer when he looked at the girls.
I noticed his finger lingering on a few particular photographs as if trying to turn back the years to reconnect with someone who still held a special place in his memory.
I could sense his mind racing backward to a specific moment, when his hand might have brushed against hers or she had said something that touched him. And even after forty years, he still remembered every word.
I noticed one girl seemed to receive more of his attention than the others. And not just from the photo in the annual, but also from more current pictures he’d found on social media.
Immediately, I knew . . .
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