I saw a Ghost today

Today started out just like any other warm spring day in Tulsa, Oklahoma. If you had told me Id be sitting in a coffee shop with a busted heel on my left shoe and bloody knee with a man I long since thought dead. I’d have told you, you were crazy. Yet here I am.

You see some ten very long years ago when I was just sixteen years old living in Seattle Washington, I had met the man I wanted to marry. I had known him my whole life.  Though before I got the nerve to inform him all of this, he went on a fishing trip with his father and grandfather and the boat disappeared into the night. We mourned the loss of these three great men and learned how to live again. So, when I was rushing between meetings this morning going about my business imagine my surprise when I see an older version of the boy who stole my heart. Mind you this was not the first time that I have seen him especially when I went home for a visit he was everywhere. I have imagined this moment a million times in my head. Now I’m sitting with my foot in his lap while he tends to my knee. We are silently staring into one another’s eyes and he softly begins to speak.

“I thought I’d never find you. What are you doing so far from home?” He whispered.

“I had to get away, your memory was everywhere.” I replied.

The next thing I knew we are in an uber on our way to his hotel room. He is rambling on a mile a minute about his adventures both on the sea and in the village so far from civilization. While I’m stuck in what feels like an episode of the Twilight Zone. Then he questions why I ran away leaving my whole life behind with no trace of where I went. To which I quickly responded

“If I left no trace how did you manage to find me?”

“Don’t play me girl I found “the box” the one hint you left just in case I ever came home. Just incase your parents had died. Nobody but me would have ever put the pieces together and it took me five years. Clever name change by the way.”

Giggling I respond, “oh you like that huh.”

“Why did you go to such great lengths to disappear?”

“It wasn’t to disappear it was to start over in a new life where you no longer existed.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“I felt like I had to erase you from my conscious mind so that I could try to live again.”

“Oh yeah well how has that been working out? He asked.

Then he reached into his back pocket and withdrew the ten-year-old wallet that I bought him for his to keep his drivers license when he turned sixteen. It looked like it had been a rough go of it. He flipped it open and reached in and pulled out a folded photograph and handed it to me. When I unfolded it, I was breathless and started crying. It was a picture of the two of us on my sixteenth birthday just days before his when he presented me with a beautiful leather journal that he now presented me. My heart started to beat uncontrollably if he has read these then he knows how I felt. Embarrassed I closed my eyes and turned away.

“Do you still feel this way? Or was it all a lie?”

“No it wasn’t all a lie. Getting over you was the single hardest thing I have ever had to do.”

“So are you over me then? Is there someone special in your life?”

“No there’s only ever been room for you in my heart. I never gave up hope that one day you would find your way to me. What about you.”

“Honestly for the first five years after we were rescued by an Alaskan tribe I had suffered a head injury so sever I had to learn to walk, talk, feed myself and I had no memory of my life before. As the five year mark quickly approached I was finally physically human again but my mind it was all over the place. I started having these flashbacks of a pretty little blonde haired, blue eyed girl. By the time I got home to

Seattle I was experiencing several flashbacks a day then as I sat in the back of my grandfathers new truck and we drove past your old house and into our driveway it all flooded back like a night mare. I was suddenly in that moment right before we pulled away and I saw you waving from the driveway.”

“So did everyone make it?”

“I wish I could tell you yes but my father’s body was never found.”

“Oh man that sucks I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be that was a lifetime ago.”

“So now that you’re here and you found me what is your plan?”

“Well considering I have been in Tulsa seven times in the last five years, I thought I’d be heading home tomorrow with still no idea what happened to you, where you were, if you were safe.”

“So you were just as surprised as I was when I saw you standing outside the bank sticking out like a sour thumb in your boots and hat talking to a man in a suit?”

“I didn’t see you until after your heel got stuck in that crack in the sidewalk were falling in what seemed like slow motion. My first thought was man she looks like Melody, but it was quickly followed by the thought that it was too easy.”

“Wow that’s a name I haven’t heard in a very long time.”

“You will always be my little Mel, no matter what your driver’s license says.”

The next thing I know he was on his knees in front of me with a ring in his hand that I Know his grandad bought for his grandmother in 1922. As he took my hand and slipped it onto my ring finger he said…