(content warning: death, grief)

It starts with a pamphlet in my wrinkled hands. Or rather, it starts much before that: it starts with the beams of flashlights crisscrossing in the fields of our girlhood; it starts with you on a stage in a flush of white light; it starts on a slick highway where the wheels of a truck are locked and skating into the wrong lane. 

Maybe it starts with the timejump waiting room.

I was sitting there, holding a clipboard, checking off boxes in the no column: No, I have not been recently hospitalized. No, I do not have breathing problems. No, I do not hear a ringing in my ears. It went on and on. No, I had to check off, I do not wish to alter past events. 

At some point, an old bride walked in—this shrinking woman, around my age, who appeared to be caught in an enormous fishing net. Lifting her skirts of tattered tulle, she carefully stepped over to the receptionist to take a clipboard. Then she sat in a chair across from me, where the dress spilled over the armrests. I tried not to stare, truly, but you know I’m nosy. It was a hard sight to ignore: the woman’s over-rouged face, the mascara caked around her eyes. 

You always pitied older folks waiting alone. Remember in the airport, before Vancouver? The man with a gray mop of hair, a suit too large, sitting in the corner with a sandwich. You had it in your heart that he was some forlorn widower, a man so alone. You started a conversation with him, and he and swore up and down about the teenager who made his Reuben wrong. I made fun of you on the plane.

I wonder—if you could see me in the waiting room, would you pity me? I digress. 

It’s hard, I’m realizing, to tell a story in a straight line, as if we experience anything in such an ordered way. 

Let me try again: the bride: alone like me. While you would have been kind if you were sitting here with her, I’ve become more blunt with age, if you can imagine that. I leaned over and said, you know, they’re going to make you change out of that.

She looked down, ran her palms across the fluffed dress, didn’t seem to get it. But I’m going to my wedding, she said.

So I said, of course, but you don’t need to wear it. You’ll already be wearing it, you see? You’re just there to watch. 

She sat there, a small face in a big white web, blinking. 

It’s okay, I said. They have wardrobe back there. You’ll be able to change.

If she heard what I was trying to tell her, she didn’t show it. His name’s Carl, she started. They cut flowers growing in a vacant lot across from the hotel for their centerpieces. Stuck them in little jars. Somewhere in her rambling, she said she’d be going to the wedding for thirty minutes, and I nearly dropped my pen. I was using nearly everything I had, which would only scrape up eight. But I suppose unlike her, I wasn’t using them to enjoy any big day. I just needed to see if I could tell you something.

I know you can’t read this, but it comforts me to write as if I’m speaking to you. Really, I’m writing this for me. But I’ve learned, there’s this problem—it is hard to pull you and me apart. How do I dissect where you end and I begin, or the other way around? How do I write about us, even a moment at a time, without acknowledging the universe of memories each moment connects to? They say time is a line, or maybe, to some, it is a loop. But to me, time is a field we sprawl on under the sun and moon, where I can feel every blade of grass—some soft, some bristled, all at once.

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A nurse took my weight and height and blood pressure, then led me to a room where a serious-looking man in a white coat stood behind a wide desk. He shook my hand, said I could call him Nathan, and told me he’d be my Jump Attendant. He asked me how I was feeling as we took our seats, and I said I was feeling ready.

That’s great to hear, he told me, but then paused and leaned forward, said we needed to talk about my preferred timepoint. He wanted to know why I selected it.

So I told him about it. It was a beautiful spring day in May. We found a little tapas restaurant in Seattle. We ate outside. Cherry blossoms littered the street with pink confetti. I don’t remember what we talked about, do you? But there was an air of sweet calm, of spring waking up.

It’s not necessarily my favorite moment with you—not even close. But I didn’t tell Nathan that. I told him I would simply like to see you and me, in the sun, eating and laughing.

He looked at me, then at the computer on his desk. All this waiting, he said, and to be frank, all this money—not to mention the forms, the psych evaluations, physicals—all the pinpointing and witness accounts. And you’re choosing to watch your friend eat?

I nodded dumbly—what else could I do? Yes, I responded. To see her and me, in the sun, eating and laughing, I repeated. Maybe my lines sounded too rehearsed. 

Nathan leaned back in his chair. This timepoint, he explained, is nine days before your friend Mara died. He peered over to his screen to read something. 

I didn’t say anything. He told me he’s sorry for my loss, but visits like the one I was requesting were ones they couldn’t grant. There is too much emotion in it, too much risk. 

I felt my old body spur with fight. You know how I get sometimes. I told him the facts: the pamphlet’s fine print said that someone cannot request a timepoint within one week of a loved one’s demise. My timepoint follows the rules.

Nathan said I was technically correct (though he also added that he personally thought the timeframe should be much longer.) He went on to tell me that I’m certainly not the first client  who’s requested a timepoint just before a cherished person’s demise. He gets it. 

Sometimes home is not just a place, but a place and a time, he said gently, quoting nearly word for word the brochure they sent in the mail. We can bring you back home, no matter when that is, and allow you to observe it, feel it again. But we can’t change what happened to Mara—do you understand?

I thought if I could see you, even from a distance, I could figure out a way to warn you. And if I figured out a way to warn you—well, then, I don’t know what would happen next. Would you poof suddenly into existence? Would all life rewind, start again from that day when you decide to not risk the interstate during that relentless downpour? Or would time fracture off into some parallel universe, where I can only imagine that you and I are safe, and laughing, and growing old, pinching at our flabbed underarms and cursing our grays, still thinking we’re twenty-two in our bones?

Nathan, who was turning out to be more stubborn than me, repeated himself and told me that he could not permit me to jump unless I understood I am only a spectator, a ghost from the future.

I told him I understood, even though I didn’t want to.

He was denying my preferred timepoint request—the last time I saw you. But said he would be happy to go through my other submissions to see if we could make an earlier timepoint work, one with less emotionality to it, he said, one where I could simply be happy and watch.

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I only submitted the Brooklyn performance in the application because it was easy to do so. In order to request a timepoint, I had to submit the exact location, date, and time, and have witnesses to confirm it. I still had the program for the show on Saturday, January 9th, 2010. But I already knew there was no way in hell I’d actually want to go back and rewatch that thing. No offense. 

Remember our two-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg? Bathroom the size of one on an airplane, kitchen barely any bigger. We were still young enough not to care, because we were in the city, and our nights were full of music and vodka, and we saw our shitty little apartment through an enchanted lens, like it was a necessary stopping point on our path to greatness.

You had been working for months and months putting together your piece for the company’s showcase. You didn’t tell me much just that it came to you once in a dream when you were younger, and you always wanted to translate it to the stage, to the body.

I went to your show that night with Ben who went by “Benny”—surely you remember him—and the first number featured all the dancers in the company. They leapt with wide legs like open scissors, they jumped straight up and fluttered their pointed feet, they planted one flamingo leg on the ground, raised their perfect arms, and spun like falling leaves. 

This is pretty good, Benny admitted, and I nodded. It was extraordinary. 

After the group number, your piece was first. You walked on tiptoes to center stage, knelt. The lights cut, then all flashed on again in blinding whiteness.

On the side of the stage, a hunched figure appeared in an off-white leotard, her face covered in a veil.  She hobbled slowly towards you, then paused to raise her hands to claw at her throat as if she were choking. Two ethereal tones chimed, and the hunched figure dropped one limp arm and dragged it around on the stage. The woman, this weird broken creature, pulled her way toward you, reached out to you.

What the hell is this? Benny whispered, and I wish I understood it myself and could say something poignant. But I didn’t. My hands started to prickle and stick with sweat. 

The hunched lady stood then, and in a wild burst started leaping in a circle around you. She jumped and jumped with arms over her head, and finally, you arose. The figure rushed towards you, throwing her arms up to the skies, then pirouetted round and round. You twirled like her, then dropped to the ground. The creature dropped, too. Then you both flailed, on opposite sides of the stage, like you were both laughing, or maybe crying. The two eerie tones crescendoed, and the stage cut to black. People around me applauded.

Benny looked at me, wondering what we just witnessed.

It’s art, I tried to defend.

It’s fucking weird is what it is, he said.

And I hate to say it, but I agreed.

Afterward, we joined you at a bar down the street with your ballet boyfriend Ivan and a few others from the company.

Your piece was the best, a thin girl tells you. There was so much emotion in it. So much expressed between the dancers.

I was drunk by that point. Oh my god, yes, the emotion, I parroted, then raised my cup. 

You looked at me and asked—Really? You liked it?

I nodded too much.

You smiled, ready to challenge me. So what do you think it was about? 

I had to think of something, so I told you that the dance represented a battle with your inner demons. It wasn’t a half-bad answer, I thought. 

You rolled your eyes. It’s not as dark as that, you said. You were trying to present more of an awakening, a catharsis.

That’s when Ivan butted in—Yes! Catharsis. That’s exactly the word he was going to say!

No you fucking weren’t, I told him, then turned to you again. What was that thing, the hunched figure crawling towards you. A monster? A ghost?

You nearly spit out your drink laughing. You said the thing on the stage was a companion. 

A twin flame, Ivan added. (I don’t understand how you dated him for eight months.)

Ok, sure, I said. And you laughed, and I laughed, because the thing was, it didn’t matter if I got it or not, if I liked it or not. You know that everything you touch is beautiful to me. 

Still, of all the places I could ever return to, a post-college interpretive dance showcase wasn’t going to cut it.

Nathan asked if I was sure. Said that since it was a dark theater, a crowded public performance, it would be an easy timepoint to spectate. 

I was sure. 

Nathan scrolled on his screen, then asked to hear about Maine. 

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I found our itinerary in an old email, so it was another easy timepoint to submit. By that time in our lives, it was difficult to see each other often. There were phone calls, long emails. It had been nearly six months—the longest we’d gone without seeing each other—when I picked you up from Logan Airport. 

I got us an AirBnB on a sparkling lake in the deep woods of central Maine, and when you entered the renovated cabin you joked that we’d come a long way from our first apartment. But there was a tension between us—I could feel it in the way you politely asked about my work, in the way you over-complimented the bottle of wine I’d picked up. Then I over-complimented the pasta you put together, and talked too much at dinner about a farmer’s market I didn’t actually go to that often. For a moment, in terror, I thought perhaps we had entered a new, fixed state, as if there was something automatic about being in our forties that dulled our souls and cast us into the quicksand of small talk.

When I soaped the dishes, I asked how Julian’s job was going, and you lifted yourself onto a countertop with your glass of red and asked me if I really cared.

Of course I care, I started seriously, but then you laughed. No, not like that, you said. Said you know I care about you and Julian, but do I really want to hear about how his accounting is going?

I rinsed off the tomato sauce that was stuck to a plate. God no, I laughed. 

Then let’s not, you said. You grabbed the bottle of wine and wandered through the back door, and I followed down to the dock that stretched over the lake. Shadows of hills sloped around us, dots of stars punctuated the sky. You leaned your head back in my lap to take them in, and then we didn’t talk about job updates or farmer’s markets. We laughed about the time we got into a historic screaming match about something we couldn’t remember, but even in our anger we called for takeout and ate it on the roof of our apartment building, passing our last clean fork back and forth. You recalled your big dance recital sophomore year, where I stood and cheered and clapped after your solo, only to find out it was a serious kind of event where everyone else sat silent. There was the double-date we double-dashed, and the day we couldn’t stop crying, when we almost adopted a cat named Peppers to assuage our sadness, and whose picture on the website made us sob even more.

I guess we made our own kind of time machine that night in Maine.

We talked about our apartment in Brooklyn, the boys we filled it with. We laughed, thinking about poor sweet Benny, how I made you break up with him for me. 

You said you were happy to do it, said he always questioned your dancing, never really understood it. I took a swig from the bottle of wine and confessed I wasn’t totally innocent in that regard.

It’s okay, you said.

I always liked it, your dancing. I tried to explain it’s an art form I didn’t totally get, but that I liked it because it felt so you. You’ve been dancing since you were a kid. I wish I had found something like that for myself.

You sat up on the dock and took the wine, said you always felt like dance found you, not the other way around. I burst out laughing, and so did you, because what a pretentious thing to say.

Then things got quiet. You missed the performances, the tediousness of rehearsal. But you told me that you still go to the studio by yourself. It makes you feel centered, you said, now that it’s just you and the dance.

What about the hunched lady? Your twin flame? Does she ever make an appearance in the studio? I asked, chuckling. 

You slapped me playfully. Then on the edge of the wooden dock, you stood and raised yourself up on your tiptoes. You were tipsy and twirled perfectly anyways. A lightness entered your body. You pirouetted again, like that Brooklyn performance all those years ago. I watched with admiration, a shadow on the dock. 

---

Nathan typed something into the computer. Said that because it was a private residence and isolated, this specific timepoint would be riskier to access, and I would have to pay a fee. He swiveled the computer screen my way and showed me the number. I shook my head. I could barely afford my eight minutes as it was.

He told me he could drop me down to three minutes, and it would kind of balance out. But I wanted all the time I could get with you. He clicked around the screen, and I knew I only had one more timepoint on my application. 

This one seems sweet, Nathan said reading over the form, and I knew because it was the last submission, he was going to try to really sell me on it before I walked away with everything but the deposit. Nathan had already blown up my plan—my dumb, obvious, hopeless plan—and I wasn’t exactly sure why I still sat there, nodding along to these places I never intended to revisit. I should have left but found myself caught in the gravity of your name, in the spell of our memories.

The last one was a throwaway, something to complete the application. I put flashlight tag—your favorite. I loved that carefree time when we were nine, when we’d spend every Saturday night at the middle school soccer field with kids from our street. I could pick any Saturday of the summer of 1997, and I know we’d be there. 

So I nodded at Nathan, sure. Let me see us young, in the dark grass, laughing and oblivious before it all. Why the hell not.

He printed a packet, I signed many lines. He left me momentarily then returned wearing denim jeans and a denim jacket. I didn’t have to change my clothes—he assured me that my blouse and capris were “timeless”—and I wanted to smack him. 

We walked down the hallway to the elevator and descended. In the white room, I stared at the machine, a silent, tall tube, stretching from floor to ceiling. Nathan opened a clear bag and removed something that looked like a plastic dog collar. Told me that to rewitness a memory can bring intense emotion, and intense emotion can make people create noises they don’t intend to. Noise will bring attention. The noise cancelation necklace was part of the contract I signed.

I nodded and he clasped it on. I opened my mouth to say hello. Nothing came out.

Then Nathan placed a bracelet around my wrist, the numbers 8:00 blinking on the face. Nathan reminded me that I had to follow him, as he’d secure the location and make sure we could spectate without interference. Told me too that he’d monitor my pulse and blood pressure, and when the eight minutes were up I’d be automatically transported back to the office. If for any reason I wanted to be transported back before then, there was a little red button on the watch I could tap and be locked out of the timepoint. 

Then Serious Nathan became even more serious and stated that if at any time I displayed behavior that seemed “risky, overemotional, or violent,” he could lock me out of the timepoint. He showed me this little silver case. Inside was a single metallic sticker he could stick on me. It would bring me back to the office before the eight minutes were up. He met my eyes, made sure I understood not to try anything. Voiceless, I gave him a double thumbs up. 

Then we stepped into the tube. He typed numbers into a screen. Said it would feel like nothing at all, though my ears might pop. Then he pressed a button. My ears popped. 

And then you wouldn’t believe it, Mara. I was standing on the black pavement of Cedar Street—it was sleek and glinting from the dull dazzle of a few crooked streetlights. It must have just rained—an uncapturable smell of wet slate and earth filled the air. The soccer field waited across the street, where the dots of our flashlights zig-zagged like drunk fireflies.

We approached the fence around the field, and when Nathan attempted to push open the chain-link door, it creaked, making him pause with animal stillness. Then he waved me over, and from behind the fence, I searched for you and me. 

How do I describe the rediscovery of us? Yellow cones of light bobbing around the field. Me, you, the others out there—probably Graham, Chloe, Vanessa—yelling joyously in the night. Sometimes I could see an arm or a shoe momentarily illuminated. Somewhere out there, you and I were sprinting and laughing, bending grass under our untied sneakers. Trying our best to stay in the dark. 

I wanted to get closer, but wasn’t sure how to tell Nathan—the absurd dog collar took my damn voice. I used my hands, made little legs with my forefingers to show walking and pointed to the field.

Nathan shook his head, whispered that we only spectate from a distance. And I felt the fight in me again. Of all the memories we have, I couldn’t believe I allowed myself to be convinced to choose one during the night, when I wouldn’t be able to see us clearly. Nathan could have warned me, but he didn’t. 

I considered actually smacking Nathan this time, but then, in a split streak of light, I saw your face. It was really you. A young you, decades before the truck would swerve out of its lane and into yours. And I know I should’ve just let you be a kid. But there’s a sharpness to the knowing, a stinging.

I started to shake the chain link, making it rattle and ring in the night. Did you hear it, as a kid? I can’t remember—did I? Nathan about lost his mind. He whispered to calm down, calm down or else, and that’s when he took out the tiny silver box, the one with the shiny sticker that would permanently whisk me away from you and back to the office. 

I paused, took my hands from the fence and froze. I’m sorry, I mouthed. I was. The box was open, and Nathan stood waiting, wondering what to do. He looked at the watch on his wrist, the one with the screen showing my pulse flickering in a fury. And before he could decide my fate, I decided for myself. I grabbed the sticker from the open box and placed it on Nathan. 

Poof. He disappeared, locked out. 

When I looked back out, though, I realized that the dancing flickers had stopped, and I couldn’t see us anymore. The game was over. Young me probably cut by the school to go home, and you may have already hopped the fence on the far side. So I ran. Ran to those tall light poles behind the bleachers, remembering where the control panel was from that dare in sixth grade.

Desperately—I only had a few minutes left—I switched the rows of toggles up and down until, all at once, the field shuddered brilliantly into view. I waited, hand over my eyes to shield the glare, hoping the sudden strange brightness was enough to make you turn around, enough to draw you back like a moth to the porchlight. 

You appeared, a small figure near center field staring up at the lights, stepping closer, all pigtailed and overalled. Do you remember it? I took shaky steps out onto the field, but my jellied legs didn’t seem to work right, like the ground was uneven, the world slant. 

I fell then, right on top of my wrist. There was a short snap, like the crack of a twig. I couldn’t say anything, the collar blocked my cry. In the damp grass, I cradled my wrist like a baby bird.

You pitied me. In a nervous, high-pitched voice, you asked if I was okay. You called me ma’am—imagine that!—and I swallowed my pain and nodded.

I pulled myself up to my feet, then walked nearer, all hobbled over, clutching my broken wrist. I tried to say your name but could not. If my voice didn’t work, I thought maybe I could write a message, trace the shapes of letters in the grass to tell you all I had to tell you. Maybe, I could write the date of the accident, and that would be enough. 

Young you stared as I lowered my right hand, a throbbing, limp thing. I tried to trace the M for May, but a pain shot up and through my arm. It wouldn’t do. I tried with my left hand, dragging it in hopeless loops and crosses. You took a step back, biting at your lower lip. 

I realized I was terrifying you. That to you, I was unrecognizable, just some voiceless lady that emerged from the dark, hunched over and with my hands trailing through the grass. 

Then I remembered Benny’s voice saying what the hell is this? And I laughed and laughed, or I silently did. Because of course, of fucking course. It was not a monster, never a demon on that stage. I get that now. 

What did Ivan call it? Twin flame.

I stood, ready. Then, in the best triumphant leaps I could muster, I pranced in a line down the field. My hands as high above my head as they could reach, just like I remembered. Gazelle-like, I bounded around you, you who took everything in with scrunched eyebrows, but no longer biting your lip. I twirled my best impression of the pirouettes I’d seen you do countless times. Again and again I spun. Then I pointed to you, inviting you to the dance. You were confused, you were entertained, you lifted one leg and spun until you fell. I spun and fell too, laughing and laughing and laughing. I could feel each blade of grass under me. 

In a moment, I would be zapped back to the white tiles of the Jump Attendant’s office. In a moment, I’d be gone from you. In a moment, you would stand alone in an empty field, but still, the dance would exist, would always exist, between us.

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Header photograph and artwork by Jordan Keller-Wilson