I found it tucked away, quite by accident, behind a stack of old discharge papers and some rather dull tax returns. A postcard. From him. It depicted a lighthouse, stark white against an impossibly blue sky, and a rocky shore that I remember so clearly. Newport, Oregon. The date on the postmark… well, it took my breath away for a moment. Forty-eight years ago this past Tuesday. Forty-eight years. I had forgotten I even kept it. He asked me, in that bold, uncompromising script of his, to come. To leave the city, to leave my work, to leave what he called my "sensible, predictable life," and join him by the sea. He promised me long walks and fresh air and a life unburdened by the relentless cadence of regulations and the peculiar anxieties of civilian interaction. He knew, even then, that I struggled with the transition from service, with the lack of clear directives, the fuzzy interpersonal dynamics that seemed to govern everything outside the barracks. I remember thinking, at the time, that it was a grand romantic gesture, but utterly impractical. An impulse. A fantasy. I wrote him a letter, a careful, measured explanation of why I couldn't possibly abandon everything. A logical, meticulously reasoned refusal. Every single day, every day since then, I have wondered if it was the correct strategic decision. Sometimes, late at night, when the house is still and the quiet settles in around me like a heavy blanket, I find myself replaying that choice. A counterfactual history, if you will. What if I had gone? What if I had packed a single suitcase and caught the next Greyhound? Would we have found a rhythm there, he and I, among the crashing waves and the damp, salty air? Would my own particular brand of introversion have been less of a hindrance, less of a disability, in a smaller, more isolated community? Would the loneliness, which has become a constant companion these days, have been… different? Or would the fundamental incompatibilities, the core disjunctions in our personalities that I intellectually understood even then, have simply manifested in a different coastal town, just as surely? I hold the card now, the ink faded, the edges softened by time, and I just wonder. What if?