What I pulled out of that hidden pocket was a thick stack of postcards, bound together with a leather strap, and a photograph worn soft at the corners from being handled so many times. The picture showed a young woman sitting on the back of that very motorcycle, her arms wrapped around the rider’s waist. Tucked beneath it was a folded letter. The first line said, “If this ever finds its way to someone else, then I never made it back to give these to her myself.” I stood there in my garage holding that letter, completely forgetting why I’d opened the saddlebag in the first place.
The postcards came from every corner of the country. Wyoming. Arizona. Montana. Tennessee. None of them had ever been mailed. They were written to the same woman over nearly twenty years. Some were only a few sentences long. Others filled every inch of the card. He wrote about sunsets on empty highways, tiny diners, roadside motels, and all the things he wished he could tell her in person. What got me was how ordinary they were. He wasn’t writing some grand romance. He was sharing his life with the person he loved, even when she wasn’t there to hear it. One postcard ended with, “Saw a field of sunflowers today. You would’ve made me stop for pictures.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about those cards. The old map in the other saddlebag had a name written on the back, and after a lot of searching, I finally found her. When I called, she was quiet for a long time after I explained what I’d found. Then she said she had spent years wondering why he’d suddenly vanished from her life.
A few weeks later, I handed her the bundle. She didn’t open it right away. She just held it against her chest and looked at that faded photograph. The last time I saw her, she was sitting on a wooden bench outside a coffee shop, reading one postcard at a time while the afternoon sun warmed the pages in her hands.