I was twenty-one when my college sweetheart, Thomas, disappeared during the Vietnam War. I was seventy-six when a stranger approached me at the airport holding an old photograph of us. “My grandfather asked me to find you,” he said. “His name is Thomas, and he’s alive.”
Thomas and I had fallen in love in college. He was an engineering student who teased me for studying literature, and I joked that engineers
made terrible boyfriends. We planned to marry after graduation. Before he deployed, he promised, “I’ll buy you a proper
engagement ring when I get back.” Six months later, military officers informed me that his aircraft had disappeared. No body was found, and his status remained missing in action.
For decades, I waited for news. I never married, although I built a fulfilling life as an English teacher. Every year on Thomas’s birthday, I visited a memorial for missing servicemen and placed a white rose there. I always brought our college photograph and told him about my life. I never stopped wondering whether he might somehow return.
