55 years ago, my high school friends and I promised to meet at our lake — yesterday was that day, and it changed my life.
My name is Harold, and back in 1970, the four of us — Tommy, Ray, Nick, and I — spent every summer afternoon at the small lake outside town.
The night of graduation, on the wooden bench we’d claimed for years, we made a promise: fifty-five years from that night, no matter where life took us, we’d meet back at that bench.
Life did what life does. Tommy moved to Australia. Ray went to Germany. Nick settled in Portugal. I was the only one who never left.
We wrote letters, then postcards, then nothing at all — the way these things fade without anyone deciding to let them.
But I never forgot the promise. As the date came this year, I told myself not to hope. Fifty-five years was impossible to ask of three old men scattered across the world.
I drove out anyway, my hands unsteady the whole way.
