He had always lived quietly, unnoticed. To the neighbors, he was just a kind old man with a cane who liked feeding pigeons and sitting on the park bench for hours. But inside, he carried a pain that never faded—old, yet sharp as the first day. Her name hadn’t passed his lips in decades, and her photograph stayed hidden in a worn leather wallet, as if he feared that strangers’ eyes might tarnish the memory.

He was twenty-seven when they met. Young, confident, with a daring smile, he believed anything in life could be fixed. She was the light—smart, full of life, with eyes that reflected the sky. Their love was sudden and all-consuming, but the world was harsher than they imagined. Careless words, hurt feelings, a letter that came too late—and she was gone. She moved far away, leaving only a few lines of farewell.

He married, raised children, worked, laughed among friends—but every evening, when alone, he returned to those memories. No one around him knew that all these years he quietly followed traces of her life, collecting scraps of news like precious relics.

Then one autumn evening, an email arrived. From a young man he didn’t know. The stranger introduced himself as her son. The message was short: “My mother remembers you. She talks about you often.” It included an address and a phone number.

That night he didn’t sleep. His thoughts raced, his heart pounding in a way it hadn’t for years. By morning, he made his decision. He would sell everything he could—his old car, the armchair where he had spent half his life, his record collection, even the watch his colleagues had given him when he retired.

A week later, he held a ticket. One way. He knew—he wasn’t coming back.

On the day of the flight, he put on his best suit. In his pocket, he carried the photograph—the one from their youth, faded and with a torn edge. In it, she was laughing into the wind, eyes squinting against the sun.

When the plane took off, he looked out the window, imagining the moment the door would open and she would walk toward him. He had even rehearsed what he’d say first.

Then his phone vibrated in his pocket. One message. One glance at the screen—and his world collapsed.

It was short:
“Don’t come. Mom died yesterday.”

He read it over and over, as if the words might change. But they stayed the same—black, cold, final.

Outside, the clouds drifted by, but he no longer saw them. In his hands, the photograph trembled, a tear falling onto the faded paper. He knew he was flying into emptiness. Everything he had lived and hoped for had vanished in a single moment.

The plane kept moving forward, but inside him there was only silence—the kind of silence where hope no longer exists.

I can continue the story in English with a second part revealing what he did after landing and how it ended.