“I almost married my high school sweetheart. She was a sharp girl. Very kind. Long brown hair, slim– the whole package. We moved to California together after graduation. We spent all our time together. We were in love. We even talked about marriage several times. Then one morning she decided she didn’t want to do it anymore. She told me things had changed. It destroyed me. Ever since then, she’s been the one that I’ve always wondered about. I actually saw her a couple years ago. She came to New York for her father’s funeral, and we took a walk in Central Park together. I hadn’t seen her in forty-five years. She looked amazing. Exactly the same as I remembered. She had two kids. She’d gotten married to some guy from Yale. Toward the end of our walk, she told me that if she could do it all over again, she probably would have never married the guy. I said: ‘That breaks my heart, because all these years I imagined you were happy.’ Of course, there might have been a small part of me that was thinking: ‘Haha! You married the wrong guy.’”
