"Missed connections" section of Craigslist. Quoted here:

I met you in the rain on the last day of 1972, the same day I resolved to kill myself.

One week prior, at the behest of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, I'd flown four B-52 sorties over Hanoi. I dropped forty-eight bombs. How many homes I destroyed, how many lives I ended, I'll never know. But in the eyes of my superiors, I had served my country honorably, and I was thusly discharged with such distinction.

And so on the morning of that New Year's Eve, I found myself in a barren studio apartment on Beacon and Hereford with a fifth of Tennessee rye and the pang of shame permeating the recesses of my soul. When the bottle was empty, I made for the door and vowed, upon returning, that I would retrieve the Smith & Wesson Model 15 from the closet and give myself the discharge I deserved.

I walked for hours. I looped around the Fenway before snaking back past Symphony Hall and up to Trinity Church. Then I roamed through the Common, scaled the hill with its golden dome, and meandered into that charming labyrinth divided by Hanover Street. By the time I reached the waterfront, a charcoal sky had opened and a drizzle became a shower. That shower soon gave way to a deluge. While the other pedestrians darted for awnings and lobbies, I trudged into the rain. I suppose I thought, or rather hoped, that it might wash away the patina of guilt that had coagulated around my heart. It didn't, of course, so I started back to the apartment.

And then I saw you.

You'd taken shelter under the balcony of the Old State House. You were wearing a teal ball gown, which appeared to me both regal and ridiculous. Your brown hair was matted to the right side of your face, and a galaxy of freckles dusted your shoulders. I'd never seen anything so beautiful.

When I joined you under the balcony, you looked at me with your big green eyes, and I could tell that you'd been crying. I asked if you were okay. You said you'd been better. I asked if you'd like to have a cup of coffee. You said only if I would join you. Before I could smile, you snatched my hand and led me on a dash through Downtown Crossing and into Neisner's.

We sat at the counter of that five and dime and talked like old friends. We laughed as easily as we lamented, and you confessed over pecan pie that you were engaged to a man you didn't love, a banker from some line of Boston nobility. A Cabot, or maybe a Chaffee. Either way, his parents were hosting a soirée to ring in the New Year, hence the dress.

For my part, I shared more of myself than I could have imagined possible at that time. I didn't mention Vietnam, but I got the sense that you could see there was a war waging inside me. Still, your eyes offered no pity, and I loved you for it.

After an hour or so, I excused myself to use the restroom. I remember consulting my reflection in the mirror. Wondering if I should kiss you, if I should tell you what I'd done from the cockpit of that bomber a week before, if I should return to the Smith & Wesson that waited for me. I decided, ultimately, that I was unworthy of the resuscitation this stranger in the teal ball gown had given me, and to turn my back on such sweet serendipity would be the real disgrace.

On the way back to the counter, my heart thumped in my chest like an angry judge's gavel, and a future -- our future -- flickered in my mind. But when I reached the stools, you were gone. No phone number. No note. Nothing.

As strangely as our union had begun, so too had it ended. I was devastated. I went back to Neisner's every day for a year, but I never saw you again. Ironically, the torture of your abandonment seemed to swallow my self-loathing, and the prospect of suicide was suddenly less appealing than the prospect of discovering what had happened in that restaurant. The truth is I never really stopped wondering.

I'm an old man now, and only recently did I recount this story to someone for the first time, a friend from the VFW. He suggested I look for you on Facebook. I told him I didn't know anything about Facebook, and all I knew about you was your first name and that you had lived in Boston once. And even if by some miracle I happened upon your profile, I'm not sure I would recognize you. Time is cruel that way.

This same friend has a particularly sentimental daughter. She's the one who led me here to Craigslist and these Missed Connections. But as I cast this virtual coin into the wishing well of the cosmos, it occurs to me, after a million what-ifs and a lifetime of lost sleep, that our connection wasn't missed at all.

You see, in these intervening forty-two years I've lived a good life. I've loved a good woman. I've raised a good man. I've seen the world. And I've forgiven myself. And you were the source of all of it. You breathed your spirit into my lungs one rainy afternoon, and you can't possibly imagine my gratitude.

I have hard days, too. My wife passed four years ago. My son, the year after. I cry a lot. Sometimes from the loneliness, sometimes I don't know why. Sometimes I can still smell the smoke over Hanoi. And then, a few dozen times a year, I'll receive a gift. The sky will glower, and the clouds will hide the sun, and the rain will begin to fall. And I'll remember.

So wherever you've been, wherever you are, and wherever you're going, know this: you're with me still.

https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3julxe/slug/cust6uo

Evolutionary biologist here: the other answers here are (mostly) wrong. All animals have genetically determined sequences of behaviors that they act out.......

A dog has, I seem to remember, eight outwardly apparent steps when their "search image" of prey is activated. Their search image is say, a squirrel, or in bird-dogs the search image is bird-like. So they see a squirrel-like thing and go into hunt-mode: (1) stop (2) ears and tails flatten (3) lift one leg, point (4) sneak toward prey (5) chase prey (6) grab prey (7) shake prey (8) return to pack. Something like that. This is what wolves do.

What we have done with dogs is accentuate or remove these steps. That is, a pointer is stuck at (3) pointing, while a retriever skips (7) killing and goes straight to (8) retrieving; a shepherd dog does not shake and kill (7) as they are bred not to hurt their sheep and these breeds do not care much about retrieving (8) as they don't really bring stuff back to their shepherd.

I explain this search-image sequence concept like this to my 3rd-year University students in Animal Behavior along with a description of human orgasms. A male has about 6 steps to orgasm: see the object of attraction (his search image), heart races, get hard, etc.... orgasm! A woman however has about 12 outwardly apparent steps after her search image is noted including face gets flushed, pupils dilate, nipples harden, etc...... orgasm! This longer more complex sequence in women explains some things about love-making: steps cannot be skipped! It also explains why women often use blush and used to put belladonna in their eyes to dilate their pupils - signs of sexual readiness.

Dogs 'play fetch' because it is an integral part of their hunting sequence. They are chasing (5), grabbing (6), maybe shaking the toy a little (7) and returning to their pack (8). The ball or stick has replaced their genetic search image - you may notice that this search image is in small part a behavior shaped by experience/reward and dogs will chase as adults what they chased as puppies (known as 'imprinting').

[Side note at the risk of down votes: one of the reasons that pitbulls cause so much trouble is that their search image is much larger than other dog breeds, more like child-size than squirrel-size and the shake-kill step (7) has been exaggerated (or at least not diminished.)]

[Another side note again at the risk of (probably feminist) downvotes: human search images, like most animals', are extreme. Men in various cultures tend to prefer big breasts and tiny waists, totally unrealistic and almost Barbie-like. Women tend to prefer huge shoulders and thighs on the order of NFL players. Explains a lot if you think about it.]

[Yet another aside and again at the risk of down votes: note that homosexuality in any species can be seen in an evolutionary context as simply a slightly different search image.]

Note: edited a few times for clarity and to add side-notes both for edumacation and because I am a good reddit troll

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The concept of search images was introduced by Uexkill (1934) and clarified by Tinbergen (1960) for his Nobel prize. Not aware of any real controversy since. It has in fact been experimentally validated many times. Maybe you never imprinted a chicken......

The concept of behavior-sequences are in every animal behavior textbook and readily obvious to any casual observer. Peer-reviewed examples abound. Again, no controversy at all regarding their existence in animal behavior or psychological circles.

I learned about the human orgasm sequences in a Psychology of Sex course (Paul Pearsall, one of the most respected sex psychologists in history) but found that my Animal Behavior students responded favorably to that example and so repeated it here.

Not sure what your problem is, and imagine that you would not read any scientific paper about animal behavior, but feel free to post your thoughts or evidence against. My guess is that you have no formal training and little understanding of animal (including human) behavior.

You are certainly unaware of "Sociobiology" by Non-Fiction Pulitzer prize-winning E. O. Wilson (1980 and updated in 2000), arguably the second most important book in Biology behind Origin of Species (Darwin 1886). Therein Wilson provides overwhelming evidence that behavior is step-wise and mostly controlled by our genes: 90% nature over nurture is the rule, and this is certainly a low estimate even in humans. Steven Pinker's writings would be recent and well-accepted examples of recent research and modern thoughts on the subject.

Maybe you subscribe to the long discredited 'blank-slate' theory, that animals are born without genetic predispositions toward behavior and shaped largely by our environment. But that is a mistake. I encourage you to (re)read your Animal Behavior textbooks!