Chapter 1: The Bench at the Edge of Everything
My name is Harold, and back in 1970, the four of us, Tommy, Ray, Nick, and I, spent every single summer afternoon at the small lake just outside town, the kind of friendship you assume, at seventeen, will simply last forever without any effort.
The night of our high school graduation, seated on the same wooden bench we'd claimed as ours for years, we made a promise.
Fifty-five years from that night, no matter where life took us, we'd all meet back at that bench, same spot, same lake.
Life did what life does.
Tommy's family moved to Australia within a year.
Ray ended up in Germany for work and never really came back.
Nick married a woman from Portugal and settled there for good.
I stayed close to home, the only one who never actually left.
We wrote letters for a while, then postcards, then eventually nothing at all, the way these things quietly fade without anyone deciding to let them go.
I never forgot that promise, though.
As the date crept closer this year, I told myself I wouldn't get my hopes up, that fifty-five years was an impossible amount of time to ask three old men scattered across the globe to remember, let alone honor.
Yesterday, I drove out to that same lake anyway, my hands unsteady on the wheel the whole way there.
I walked down toward our old bench, and instead of my three friends, I found three large boxes sitting there, waiting for me.
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What was inside those boxes?
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And where were Tommy, Ray, and Nick after all these years?
Comment **"NEXT"** if you want Part 2 — it's in the comments.
