Leanne Michaels sat on the bench where it all began. The very bench where her love with Johnny took off like a wildfire, passionate, strong, and true. It was like nothing she had ever experienced in her entire life, something that no word in the English language could come close to describing.

It was also the same bench where it came to a crippling end. An end so devastating that, even now, three years later to the day, a horrible pain still ripped through Leanne’s body as she sat on the bench in the Chicago park.

Every second of the relationship Leanne could remember vividly -- from her first sight of him to her last -- all of the memories replayed in her head like a movie. Each one so clear, so real, so… painful. She didn’t think about their time together often, for it was much too painful.

So she chose to forget, a whole one year and three month’s worth of memories, forgotten. Or so she liked to think.

They weren’t completely gone. And once a year she relived all of them, on the very bench that she was sitting on now. Every year when March 14th, that horrible, fateful day, rolled around, Leanne came to the bench in the park where everything began.

Once a year she let herself remember. She sat on the bench and let them all come to her, every last one of them. The memories were proof that it had all actually happened, proof that she hadn’t made up her time with him.

And she secretly hoped that, wherever he was, on this day, he thought about her, too.