Promise Me

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When I was a young man, I loved a woman with all my heart, but we couldn't be together, so I moved away to another city.

They say you choose your own fate. Maybe that's true for I married a woman who was nothing like her, so I would never remember. She married a man who is just like me, so she would never forget.

She's past fifty now and gray around the edges, just like me. She has children and a good marriage, but it wasn't always a good marriage. Someone who knew us all asked me to help. What I did is known only to two people (and I promised I would never tell).

I think of her sometimes, but not very often and not within the wintry confines of a lost love. I think mostly of that promise.

She never knew what I did for her and she never will.

I promise.

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