In April Nights Past

Prologue

The obscenely large envelope sticking out of the mailbox like a hastily parked car was the first thing that caught my eye when I arrived from the City Market.
The mailbox, which was made of pine and designed to deter mail thieves, was an inheritance from the previous owner of the house. It sat atop the left side of the gate where I had it mounted to provide an aesthetic accent. It had no other purpose and had never been used for anything other than as an occasional bird feeder during the warmer months of the City of Baguio.
I fished the folder out and stuck it inside the paper bags as I went inside the house. I had a lot of things to do that day and getting a month's worth of groceries was only one of them. It would be hours and hours later that I finally had the chance to open the envelope only to find a letter from home - or at least the place that I considered home - and an invitation to the Annual Pag-Ulot Festival of Pueblo Maria Angeles. It was brief, it was cordial; everything that could be  read and found in an invitation.

I carried the invitation to the study and on impulse started to rummage through my books. It was a random search and I hadn’t really expected to find anything but as I lifted one of the flaps of a book, I found it; a neatly folded piece of paper that swayed as it fell to the floor.
I picked it up to wipe the dust away, making perfectly sure not to crumple it. Although age had stained and yellowed it, I knew what it was, just the same. The passage of several years of emptiness had allowed me to memorize what was on it.
When I unfolded the letter I found a younger me grinning back on a photograph that had strangely been torn in a way so that all that was left on it was me. I was only sixteen there. In it I could see where I had slung my arm around her as we stood next to each other in that carefree stance of two people who had believed that the world was a beautiful place, endlessly exciting and full of magic. I could not remember who had photographed us. I always did have difficulty bringing to mind details like that, somehow. But I know and will always remember who it was on this particular frame with me.
Unlike those around me, I only have one summer to remember. I remember it because on that one summer when I was only sixteen, somebody taught me how to care genuinely for the first time. And after all these years no other gesture ever compared to it.
A simple thought but there it was. And so, with a few blinks of my eyes as I fought the tears that threatened to escape, it was midsummer again.