The last time I saw my first love was on my 17th birthday—thirty years later, a woman who looked exactly like her stepped into my yard

to find.

The casket at her funeral was closed. I sat in the front pew and stared at it for an hour, certain in that way grief sometimes manufactures its own logic, that if I just waited long enough, she’d walk in the back door and apologize for the joke.

She didn’t.

I stayed in this town. I worked. I had relationships that mattered and then didn’t, each continue reading …