The hallway was a sea of papers thrown every which way as a final act of celebration, defiance, or peer pressure. He reached down and picked up one of the stray papers on the floor. It was crumpled and had two shoe prints on it, one nearly smack in the middle and one leading off its right hand corner. It was comical, really – this annual act of chaos, for what was school if not ordered and organized?

He thought back through the years. He recalled the early years of preschool and kindergarten where he made friends, said goodbye for the day with high fives, and happily absorbed first things like making paper costumes for holidays and counting to one hundred. Memories of home school years with his sisters were a collage of songs about fractions, and reading assignments in the tree house, and timed tests, and the quick red fox jumped over the lazy brown dog typing lessons. He thought of the Middle School years when all around him tried to fit in while feeling out-of-place. And here he was – in the High School hallway he’d walked through countless times. He looked around. The halls were quiet now. Everyone had rushed outside to linger over last goodbyes for the year and then jump into summer with both feet.

What was it really, this routine of sitting and listening and reading and writing and studying and testing? What was the working out problems on a sheet of paper? What was the rehearsing of lines and notes? He stared off in the distance, turning it over in his mind. The future could hold more of the same if he chose, and he did. But not the same. Sitting in a class was a small part of learning. It provided building blocks. But how to use those blocks – that was the real assignment. And how to live his life – that was the true test.

He was on his own now. He would decide what to study just as he would decide what paths to take and which to leave untraveled. The shoe print smack in the middle of the paper? It wasn’t his. But the other one, the one beginning its own trail? A shadow of a smile crossed his face. If it wasn’t his now, it would be.

Photo: Joe Mabel [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

She shook the snow from her foot. Stepping into a rather large slush pile on the curb wasn’t a good omen for this meeting. Why was she even going? One, she didn’t even know the guy. Two, a random drawing at the local coffee shop probably wasn’t the best way to meet someone. Three, where was her best friend who had talked her into it in the first place? Half-way across the state by now, she guessed – making a trip home to surprise her family on Valentine’s Day. Who surprises her family on a day meant for love?! Well, okay. Maybe that wasn’t quite what she meant. But any sane person would know what she meant without her having to clearly articulate it.

She pulled the paper heart out of her coat pocket and squinted at the address. It was just the next block. When the barista had given them each a pink paper heart with their lattes and told them to write their name on it, it had seemed harmless. She had noticed he told his male customers to write their name and also the name of a local diner or restaurant, time, and date. Later, another barista had passed around a glass canister for each to drop in the pink paper. As they left, they were given a heart with a name, restaurant address, date, and time. Her friend’s poor guy would be stood up. If she was any kind of smart, hers would be, too. Still, underneath it all she believed everyone should agree with her assessment: Valentine’s is a day when corny is cool.

She stuffed the heart back into her coat pocket, pulled off a glove to run her fingers through her hair, and stole a glance at herself in the window of a shop she passed. One more building and she would be there. She stopped. What was she thinking? She would just go home. No harm, no foul. As she turned around, she bumped into a man. Mid-twenties, she guessed. Dark hair. Athletic build. Tennis shoes with a small rip on the right side.

An ‘excuse me, maybe you should look where you’re going’ nearly escaped her lips. It didn’t. He looked up from what he’d been reading. In his hand was a pink paper heart.

Valentine’s is a day when corny is cool.

Image: enwikipedia.org-heart.jpg

He unfolded the paper and reread it one last time.

You want to move on, I know. But in case somewhere down the road when your mind wanders to past things and you want to remember, I’m leaving the twig on the base of the statue in the park we used to call ours. I know how you loved it – that small, silly representation of first love I broke off from a fledgling tree during our first walk there. Remember how every walk after, we toasted the growing tree with that twig? You can have the symbol of its springtime buds and summer leaves and vivid autumn color and sparkling snow resting on its bare winter branches. You can have the path we traced so many times, the faint sound of timeless music playing at the band shell on the other side of the lake, and the pungent scent of lakeshore. You can have the sunsets so brilliant they make your heart ache.

I’m leaving in the morning. I’ll always hope for your happiness, for good things to come your way, for blessing to meet you on the sidewalk.

He refolded the note, stooped down and slid it under her apartment door. Turning, his form bathed in a sunset of deepest orange and red, he walked away.

Image: Acer_tataricum_twig-wikimedia-commons.jpg; pixabay-sunset-214576_640-CC0-Public-Domain.jpg