Eddie had been severely wounded—shrapnel that had shattered his hip and leg, injuries that required him to be medevaced out immediately. He spent the next year in a grueling, painful recovery at a VA hospital in the States. “I was broken, Sarah,” he said softly, his voice thick with regret.
“I came back missing pieces of myself, both physically and mentally. I was angry, depressed, and entirely lost. Your letters… they were so full of light. You had your whole life ahead of you. The prom, graduation, college. I couldn’t bear the thought of dragging you down into the dark hole I was living in.
I felt like I didn’t deserve to hold onto that light anymore. So, I made the hardest decision of my life. I threw away my stationary, and I let you believe whatever you needed to believe so you could move on.” I reached out and took his weathered hand.
“You were never a burden, Eddie. Not once.” He smiled, a sad, beautiful smile, and reached into his back pocket. He pulled out a worn leather wallet, the leather cracked and thinning with age. With trembling fingers, he carefully unfolded a small, fragile square of paper.
It was yellowed, the ink faded almost entirely, but I recognized my own teenage handwriting immediately. It was the very last letter I had sent him, the one where I complained about a terrible haircut and described the smell of the impending spring rain. “I never threw this one away,” he confessed.
“I carried it every day. When things got too heavy, I’d read it, just to remember what the rain smelled like back home.” We talked until the sun went down. He told me about his life—he had never married, having spent most of his years working for the postal service and volunteering at various veteran organizations.
He had moved to my state a decade ago to be closer to a buddy from his old unit, completely unaware he was living only twenty miles from the girl who used to write him letters. Finding Eddie didn’t erase the grief of losing Kenneth.
Life doesn’t work like a movie where one perfectly timed reunion fixes all the broken pieces of a heart. But finding him stitched up a wound I hadn’t realized was still bleeding. We lost fifty years of friendship to fear and silence, but as he walked me out to my car that evening, leaning on his cane, he asked if he could take me to lunch the following week.
“I think I owe you a few letters’ worth of catching up,” he smiled. I smiled back, the weight of a half-century lifting off my shoulders. “You have a lot of explaining to do about the last fifty years, Soldier.” We are having lunch on Thursday.
I don’t know what the future holds, but for the first time in a very long time, I am looking forward to finding out.
