Disappearance in Chelsea

Her shoe print remains in the aging cement, some forty years after what turned out to be our goodbye kiss.

I see it every day on the walk I take with my Cairn Terrier, Tobin.

A crisp fall New England afternoon was the last time I, or anyone else, saw Navy Nurse Lieutenant Kathleen Springer.

It was against military regulations for us to be carrying on a romantic relationship, she being a Naval officer and I an enlisted hospital corpsman, but that didn't prevent us from entering into a brief but profound affair.

We stepped over that invisible line, and we paid a price.

I think about it to this day and I would give anything to step with her over that line again.