I remember the last time I saw her: I dropped her off at her host parents’ house and the next day she would fly back home across the Atlantic Ocean. She said the best way would be to pretend like we were going to see each other tomorrow.

“See you later,” she said with a smile and slight wave as she stepped out of the car.

I said, “See you tomorrow,” but I felt the weight of a 1969 cranberry-red Pontiac GTO sitting directly on my chest.

I watched her walk across the late-afternoon lawn.

Every part of me was screaming inside. I needed to see her again one day. It wasn’t even a question.

But life carried me far away from that afternoon, like some piece of driftwood in the ocean. So many tomorrows that all added up to a lifetime where I would never encounter her again.

Eliot S. Ku is a physician who lives in New Mexico with his wife and two children. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Raven Review, Whiskey Tit, Call Me Brackets, Maudlin House, HAD, Bending Genres, and Carmen et Error, among other places.

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