The lost Miles Davis album

She swore she’d seen it. An album cover with Miles Davis silhouetted against an indigo skyline, trumpet cradled like a sleeping child. His shadow spilled long and jagged across the pavement, merging with the night. She couldn’t remember the name, but the image? She could paint it from memory. The moon hung low and fat, the skyline jagged like busted teeth. She described it so often I started to see it, too, flickering behind my eyes like the afterglow of a camera flash.

“This isn’t Kind of Blue,” I’d say, sprawled out on her lumpy thrift-store couch while she dug through vinyl bins like a truffle pig on a good scent. “This isn’t Bitches Brew. This isn’t Sketches of Spain.”

She’d wave me off like a gnat. “No. It’s not any of those. It’s different.” Her hands would trace the outline of it, fingers painting invisible smoke rings in the air. “I remember the way it felt when I saw it. I had it in my hands.”

We made a mission of it. Saturday afternoons at dusty record shops with creaking floors and the smell of old cardboard. She’d rifle through the stacks, flipping past Thelonious Monk, Coltrane, Art Blakey, fingers nimble and determined. The shopkeepers got to know us. They’d nod when we walked in, knowing the question before it even left her lips.

“Miles Davis album. Skyline. Trumpet in shadow.”

They’d squint, tap their chins, maybe scratch their beards if they had one. Sometimes they’d try to sell us something else. Quiet Nights. Filles de Kilimanjaro. Porgy and Bess. She’d shake her head each time, polite but resolute. “No, you’d know it if you saw it.”

The search drifted from charming to ritualistic, then straight into madness. I remember lying awake at night, watching her silhouette against the moonlight streaming through our broken blinds. She would scroll through obscure jazz blogs, online archives, even black-and-white photographs of old record store walls, desperate for a glimpse of it. She once found a description in an old Jazz Times article that almost matched. She shrieked and spun around, her eyes shining like she’d cracked the code to the universe. We drove two hours the next day to a record shop outside Philly.

It wasn’t there.

We ate soggy cheesesteaks at some dive on the way back, and she stared out the window, her chin propped up on her hand like she was watching her own distant shoreline disappear.

“It was real,” she whispered, not even looking at me. “I remember the way it felt.”

There was something in her eyes when she said it. A flicker of sadness, maybe, but stronger than that. Devotion. A loyalty to a memory, even if it was fractured, even if it was impossible. It was like she couldn’t let go of it, because if she did, that meant she had been wrong. And she could never be wrong—not about this.

But I was tired. Tired of flipping through endless bins of vinyl with cracked spines and mildew stains. Tired of nodding politely at jazz snobs who tried to sell me on albums we both knew weren’t it. Tired of searching for a ghost.

I think that’s when the real cracks began to show. The Miles Hunt, I called it. She hated that. Said I wasn’t taking it seriously anymore. I tried. I swear I did. I kept going with her to record shops and online forums, but my heart wasn’t in it. It was gone, buried under the weight of all that hope and insistence.

One night she showed up at my door with a stack of old jazz magazines, her eyes wide and frantic. “I think I found someone who’s seen it!” she said, her voice brittle with excitement. She spread them out on my floor like tarot cards, pointing to snippets of articles and grainy photos of album covers. I didn’t have the heart to tell her they all looked like shadows and static.

We drifted. Miles came between us, his phantom album wedged like a stubborn ghost. I started making excuses, saying I had work to do or a family thing I couldn’t miss. I couldn’t keep wandering through stacks of dusty records like some half-baked Indiana Jones searching for the Lost Ark of Jazz.

The last time I saw her, she was waiting outside a shop downtown, flipping through a crate with a cigarette dangling from her lips, her hair pulled back in that messy way she never bothered to fix. She saw me and smiled, lifting a record above her head like she’d just pulled Excalibur from the stone.

“This might be it!” she shouted. I waved back, but kept walking.

Sometimes I wonder if she found it. If she’s out there somewhere, still thumbing through old records with that stubborn glint in her eye. Or if she finally pulled it from the dusty depths of some forgotten shop, held it in her hands, and whispered, “I told you.”

And sometimes I dream of it—the album cover, the skyline, Miles standing like a shadow in the moonlight. It’s almost real in my mind. Real enough to make me wonder if maybe she wasn’t crazy after all. Or maybe I’m just catching her ghost.