Ghosted

Hey boo

That’s what her first Bumble message read. It was the first coincidence; I was about one hour away from going on a ghost tour, which I told her.

How touristy of you! she replied.

‘When you’re riding solo, you kinda have to look for stuff to get you out of your comfort zone,” I typed, dancing around my hotel room and sipping Hunch Punch, which I thought was weak enough to drink straight.

Nothing’s weak enough to drink straight when you have a mason jar of it.

We messaged back and forth a little and she asked my star sign. American girls always want to know your star sign. "Virgo," I wrote. "August 27th."

Show me your ID?

A strange request, but I complied. She sent back a photo of her driving license, zoomed in on DOB: 08/27/1989. Not the (correct) British format, but we had the same birthday. The odds of which must be 1 in a million.

Actually, 1 in 133,225 and change. But I call two or more coincidences fate.

"I know asking this is forward and weird, but I've got one night in Savannah and I gotta make it count. Want to join me on this ghost tour?" Then I waited.

I'm driving right now, trying not to die messaging you back.

"Ok, tell you what, don't message me back right now. I'll stay on the WiFi until I'm heading out to the Six Pence Pub in an hour and a half. Hopefully I'll see you there."

With ten minutes to spare, the message came through: I'll see you at six.

. . .

Even though I'd already had more than enough to drink, a stranger insisted that "it was only right" to buy a real Brit a pint in a British pub. Being from the UK has its benefits.

When _____ met me outside, she told me that the guide had let her jump on the tour for free because she was local. I guess being from anywhere has its benefits.

A while later, walking past yet another site of horrific murder(s) and/or hauntings, I took her hand in mine. "Wow, that was fast," she said with a smirk.

"Very unBritish of me, right? Like I said. Accelerated schedule." I replied, then added "wait, good fast or bad fast?"

"Just fast," she said. But she squeezed my hand tighter.

Eventually the group came to a cemetery with a sturdy lock on its gate. That's one way to stop local goths doing their photoshoots in there.

Right next to it, in the shadow of St. John the Baptist Cathedral, there was a playground. It struck me as terrible city planning but it's a good reminder that, in Savannah more than most places, we live among the dead.

It was then that I heard the rustling of leaves by the fence. Not a rodent, not a bird, but the noise of a child shuffling their feet. Instinctually I bent to one knee and said "hey there, it's OK. You don't need to be scared."

Nothing. And then, a second later, the noise of tiny footsteps running away.

"You heard that too, right?" I asked _____.

"Yeah, I heard it. Weird. But stuff like that happens around here."

After one last look into the cemetery, we bailed on the rest of the tour, which was rapidly losing ground to a group of noisy frat bros. Right after encountering a ghost seems like the best time to cash out of a ghost tour.

Walking hand in hand along the water, we passed a riverboat engraved with GEORGIA QUEEN. I turned to her and asked "Whatcha say, you want to be my Georgia Queen?" I didn't know where the words had come from, but they worked so perfectly in the moment that I didn't question it.

After a few more drinks in a dive bar by the river, we headed back to my hotel. We curled up next to each other, laughing and talking until we fell asleep. Infinitely more intimate than sex could have been.

I was booked into a hotel on the edge of some nothing town the next evening. Non-refundable. I'd never cancelled a non-refundable hotel in my life but, for her, I'd have cancelled a thousand of them.

The next day she picked me up in her beat up old SUV whose passenger seat I came to think of as mine. I threw my bags in the trunk and we set off for her place, which she'd whispered in that hotel bed could be my place too. At least for a few days.

"Huh," she said aloud, and I asked what was wrong. "I just missed the exit to my street," she replied. "I was too busy looking at you." The discordant screech of Saosin's former vocalist offered the perfect counterpoint to the tenderness of the moment.

So I floated around Savannah, and she would join me once she got off work. We ate slices of pizza where, according to her, the actor Norman Reedus used to sit when he was dating a girl from the city.

We tasted wines in City Market. Took trips back in time walking around Picker Joe's Antique Mall. Drank frozen cocktails from open containers in the Historic District. I fell in love with the city while I fell around love with her.

One night she forgot to take her birth control and, doubling up the next morning, I had to fight the urge to suggest that she keep skipping it.

But all good things come to an end.

. . .

Before I left town we took one last photo, faces smushed together, in the front of her SUV. It's the only one I can find of the two of us anymore.

As soon as the redundant shutter sound of my iPhone clicked, a skeuomorphic trait shared by all modern smartphones, our chapter began to feel more like one that was ending than one that was beginning.

I took a selfie in the town I’d been supposed to stay in all those nights ago to send her as a joke. When I looked more closely at the photo, a trick of the light made it look like I was bleeding from my nose and one of my eyes.

On my flight home I became obsessed with a song called It's Killing Me To Love You. I listened to it over and over again, drowning out the hum of the plane's engines, breathing in the recycled air until I passed out.

Back in England I fell into a kind of depression. I joked to friends that a ghost had hopped aboard me when I was in Savannah, haunting me, but enough time passed that I started to actually believe it.

We stayed in touch at first, just like we said we would. Then, as time went by, we strayed a little further from each other. Not quite touching, but not quite apart. And then, finally, one of us let go.

A couple of years later, mindlessly scrolling through Instagram, I saw the pictures of her wedding. Photographic evidence that something I thought might still exist somewhere didn't anymore.

She looked happy, and I wondered if she'd looked that happy with me.

I haven’t been back to Savannah since that trip but, when I do go, I wonder if I'll return to the places we spent our days and nights. I wonder if she would still be living in that apartment, which she said she'd never leave.

I worry that I wouldn't be able to find all of the spots that we made ours. But, more than that, I worry that this time around it would feel like I was the one who was doing the haunting.