Soda

Years later, he received an envelope in the mail, the long lost picture inside with a brief handwritten note.  Yours, I believe.  No signature.  He and a woman smiling, standing on a brick sidewalk, before a lime green vintage Volkswagen Beetle, a convenient backdrop as they asked a passerby to take their picture..  She had long black hair, thick in the front, a disheveled by wind or sleep style, wearing purple shirt and jeans; he sported a five o’clock shadow and brown hair, white collared shirt, grey linen sport coat, and jeans.  Each had a hand on a soda bottle, a tandem clutch of a recently won award.  It was his picture; she was his girlfriend at the time, and even after they had broken up, gone their separate ways, he was confounded by whatever happened to that picture.  When he received it, he remembered the address: he’d sent a package to Montana years ago.  He spent a moment thinking about the woman, smiling.  Radiant, effervescent.  The person he’d mailed the picture to must’ve been enamored with her, as he once was, and held onto it until the love went flat.  There were probably similar pictures of her and discarded men scattered across the country.  She long lost, the men as ghosts.