She broke my heart worse than any woman has done since. Inconsolable, I came home from the dance and sobbed myself to sleep. My mother tried to comfort me, but I was alone in a sea of hurt and there were no lifelines strong enough to pull me to safety.

Was it just one dance, or perhaps two? The scent of Prell was fresh in her hair and the touch of her hand and the warmth of her body while slow-dancing had me in a heaven I had never before experienced. The girl I had longed to hold was finally in my arms. Little did I know it was to be short-lived. The music stopped and he stepped over and that was the last I saw of her that night.

What torture to then have to wait for your parents to come pick you up. Sitting as high in the bleachers as you can get just to avoid having to face anyone else. Watching him with her, seeing your own dream dissolve in front of your eyes.

Of course, I eventually returned to the world of the living, but the sorrow of that loss did not fade easily. In eighth grade your world is much smaller, and such events fill a greater proportion of that world.

Defining moments, we call those. Events that shape the rest of your life, often in ways that become so engrained in ones personality that there is no way to link the effect back to the cause. This was surely one of mine and I suspect that it has influenced every subsequent relationship I have ever had with the opposite sex.

They published yearbooks in my junior high school but I unfortunately either lost or disposed of mine. It’s funny how many things I got rid of over my life that I wish I had now. You never know what importance you will attach to something later in life.

Memories grow dim over the years and I have often wondered what that girl who broke my heart looked like at the time. I have a listing on Classmates/Memory Lane and the other day I got one of the usual promotional emails from them. Having nothing better to do, I clicked on through and browsed a little bit through my school history. They have a feature now where they have a limited selection of yearbooks available, depending on what members have contributed.

I saw a note that one of my classmates had yearbooks available. I checked to see what he had, but there were none for my old junior high. What about high school? My family moved when I was in my last year of junior high so I never went to the high school that all my junior high classmates attended. Lo and behold, there was a yearbook available for that high school, including the year that my class would have gone into high school.

Flipping through the online pages, I finally came to the pictures of the students. Scanning down through pictures that look so dated and yet so familiar . . . there she was! And if it wasn’t for the name next to the picture, I could have never picked her out of the bunch. How very strange to be looking at the face of the person who had hurt you more than any other person in your life, and to not be able to connect that face to the pain. In a strange way, it was kind of cathartic. As though that pain lost its relevancy to my life.

Of course, having gone that far I had to pursue the subject. Where was she now? From the yearbook I discovered that I had been misspelling her first name all these years. It is a somewhat unique name, so searching that name and the town I knew she lived in at the time led me to her current last name, and eventually to her Facebook page.

When we picture people from our past we tend to have them frozen in time. They will always look to us like they did when we last saw them. That is, until we see them again. It’s called the class reunion phenomenon. I had forgotten what she looked like, but the image had been renewed from the yearbook picture. The person I found on Facebook was nothing close to that woman child I knew.

I have been shocked into reality like this before when I saw a current photo of a woman I had an interest in back in college. It is an unsettling experience and brings the reality of your own age sharply into focus. Suddenly the loss of the young junior high girl wasn’t such a bad thing. If the experience of seeing her picture in the yearbook had been cathartic, this experience was positively liberating.

Don’t get me wrong, I was not still grieving over having had a young girl stolen from me at a school dance. Perhaps, though, I have carried a portion of that pain with me through all these years. If so, it is now released. If only all the baggage in our lives could be so easily unloaded.