Reunion by Alan Lightman

Reunion
by Alan Lightman

While attending a thirtieth-anniversary college reunion, Reunion's narrator wanders off by himself and gets stuck in reverie, seeing himself as he was back in college, but from the outside, and wondering how things might have been if at a few critical junctions he'd acted differently.

But this middle-aged professor, who is sliding toward numbness and nihilism, remembers what it was like to be in love, and when he comes back to the present, he recaptures that sense. It might sound kind of corny, but Lightman's soft touch and spartan prose makes the story credible and enjoyable.