19/09/2025
“The Photograph in His Wallet”
He was known to the locals: polite, well-dressed, silver hair always neatly combed. People smiled at him. Some even asked how his day was going.
He always smiled back.
But no one really knew him.
In his wallet, behind his driver’s license and a few folded bills, he kept a worn photograph. It was old — black-and-white, edges frayed. It showed a woman with wind-blown hair and eyes full of light. Her hand was in his. They were laughing. Young. Alive.
He never took the photo out in public. Never spoke of her.
She had been gone for nearly 40 years.
Their love was short — three summers and one winter — and it ended not with betrayal, but with silence. An illness that crept in and took her before they even turned 30.
They hadn’t been married. No children. No family photos on the wall. Just memories.
After she passed, the world kept turning. Friends urged him to “move on,” to “find someone else,” as if love were a coat you could replace when it got worn.
But he never did🥹🥹🥹🥹🥹.
And after a while, people stopped asking.
Now, at 68, his life was made of routine. Quiet streets, simple meals, kind nods from strangers. But inside, there was a whole world that no one could see — a voice he still heard in dreams, a laugh he hadn’t heard in decades but could still recall perfectly.
Sometimes, he wanted to tell someone. To say, “She mattered. She was real. And I loved her more than anything.”
But the words never came.
Because some stories don’t need to be told to be lived.
And some love never fades — even if no one else knows it ever existed.