Ten Years Buried

The schoolyard looked smaller than I remembered. The maple was unchanged. I dug beneath it, and a rusted steel capsule shrugged off the soil. Ten years ago, on New Year's Day before graduation, the three of us buried it here. A dial padlock was fastened to it. Back then we deliberately wrote the number down and laughed — "obviously we'll remember in ten years." And now the digits would not come. Luckily a note in marker pen still survived on the side of the capsule, the childish letters blurred by rainwater.