Romance

We were hang gliding, talking to each other over Bluetooth, when she told me she’d been on the Titanic. I thought she meant some attraction, like at MGM or in Branson, but she claimed she’d been on the actual Titanic, a steerage passenger as a young girl who fell in the water when the ship cracked in half, got conked in the head by a floating armoire, then crawled inside, where she sank to the depths, froze into a block of ice, and sat at the bottom of the ocean for seventy-three years, discovered when they discovered the rest of the ship in 1985, though they didn’t bring her to the surface for another seven years, thinking they’d just found an armoire, so they were in no hurry. Once they lifted her aboard and unlatched the door, there she was, a terrified little girl frozen like a salmon in your kitchen freezer, no one thinking she’d be alive when the ice thawed, having already helicoptered in the top archaeological coroner in Western Europe, only to see a finger twitch, then a blink, then a breath, not that she just woke up and asked where she was, what year it was, etc., instead falling into a coma for a decade, but after that, aged slowly, as if she still had ice in her veins, explaining why she was a little girl in 1912 and still a little girl in 1985 and was my age now, 33, forty years later, and would still be young when I was an old man, but she was dealing with that, saying we should just enjoy our glide, which she made me miss by telling her story. I told her I didn’t mind, that if I was quiet it was because I wanted her to finish, and I didn’t want to crash into the ocean, and it was an awful lot to take in, and how listening was better than conversing sometimes, something I’d been working on lately, wondering if she’d noticed—she had. She said she’d been looking for the right time to tell me for ages, and hang gliding the coast of Maui, the very epitome of romance, seemed to be that time. It made me acutely consider whether I should still pop the question or just keep the ring in my pocket, everything so much more complex, though the possibilities exponentially more endless.