She found me with it in October. She didn’t say anything at first. She just sat down on the arm of the chair and looked at the photograph with me. Then she told me she’d been carrying something in her purse since that same trip. She reached inside and pulled out a folded piece of paper that had been kept there for thirty-five years. She handed it to me without explaining, and I recognized the handwriting immediately.
It was a note I’d written to her before we left Nova Scotia. I’d forgotten it completely. It said that I hoped I would never become the kind of man who looked back at his younger self and wished he’d stayed there. She read it again and said she’d carried it all these years because she’d been afraid I’d forgotten the person I’d promised to become. Then she looked at the photograph and said, “I don’t miss that woman. I miss the man she believed was standing beside her.”
I didn’t know what to say. I told her that I hadn’t realized what I was doing when I looked at the photograph. I thought I was remembering being young, but she said I’d been using that woman as evidence against the life we’d built. She told me she was still the same person, just older, tired sometimes, and standing four feet away instead of beside a rented car. Then she put the photograph back in my hand and said, “If you want to remember who you were, talk to the woman who was there.”
That night I put the photograph in the drawer instead of on the table beside my chair. My wife sat beside me and we talked about that trip for almost two hours, remembering things neither of us had mentioned in decades. I asked her what she remembered about the man in the photograph, and she laughed and said, “He was wonderful, but he had no idea what he was doing.” Then she took my hand and said, “You don’t have to become him again. You just have to stop being afraid that you’ve lost him.”
