Mel looked up at me with a tentative smile. Her eyes did not contain the same endearing nervousness as on our wedding day. They hid something much tenser now.
“Are you sure this is going to be okay?” Mel asked. “I’ve read that some people weren’t the same afterward.”
“It’ll be fine,” I said curtly.
The Advanced Therapy Module for Defective Marriages was a controversial approach to wellness. Its effectiveness rate was estimated to be 99.999%; however, the other .001% scared her. It scared us. Most of the information about the adverse effects of the drug was apocryphal. Still, if the rumors were true, a bad trip would result in death or lunacy.
We swallowed the pills.
“I don’t think they’re working,” Mel said after thirty minutes.
I exhaled sharply through my nose out of annoyance. I immediately felt terrible about this petty affectation. I knew I had no reason to be frustrated. All of this was my fault, after all.
When we first started dating, everything was so effortless. Conversation flowed, romance bloomed, and our kisses had no end or beginning. It kept on like that for a while.
Despite being so in love, I opposed marriage. Even in our sacred moments lying together in her bed, I trivialized commitment. I knew that lamenting its pointlessness wasn’t charismatic, but I couldn’t help it. That cynical fungus had been growing on me for as long as I knew.
Yet somehow, our love overpowered my cynicism. We were having a picnic in the woods on one gloriously orange autumn afternoon. We lay in the shade of a large oak tree, holding one another and sharing our most profound fears and secrets. The fragrant smell of the nearby gardenia bush enveloped us.
Mel stroked my hair and told me stories from her childhood — lovely, scary, intimate stories that brought her humanity into focus. I felt like I could see all of the multitudes which made her so beautiful. She was a kind friend, a loyal sister, and a winsome daughter. At that moment, I realized I loved her.
Her head was resting on the crook of her arm as we lay on the checkered blanket. The crisp air blew her hair from behind and shrouded her freckled face. I leaned over to kiss her and, in doing so, noticed light reflecting off of the ground. I dug into the dirt and found an opal peeking from its craggy enclosure. After a light cleansing of water, it shone in the sunlight. The dizzying array of colors reminded me of her eyes. I pressed it into her palm and told her never to let it go.
It wasn’t long after that day that I asked her to marry me, and on our third anniversary, I had the opal turned into a necklace.
Our marriage was good until it wasn’t. There wasn’t some scandalous incident that broke me. The little comments, the loathsome routine, and the mundanity were suffocating. Gradually I stopped listening to Mel when she spoke. I withdrew into myself. The longer I stayed depressed, the more confident I was that we would turn out bland and bitter like my parents.
I sought the Advanced Therapy Module because I was fed up with being mired in my misery. I had to go back to being the husband she needed me to be.
We lay in our marriage bed and prepared for the drugs to hit. Our bed in which we had spent countless hours talking through the night about everything and nothing. Our bed which had absorbed so much spilled coffee, wine, laughter, and tears. Our bed had brought us to this moment, the place where we would fix it all or die trying.
The pills took effect. We started to feel weird.
I turned on my side. Seeing her familiar smile made me more at ease. Then the room started to spin. Everything whirled past us without our consent. I just wanted it to stop. Then we were taken up in the sky.
It wasn’t only objects changing outside of our comfy little room but time itself. One moment our casual, modern clothes would shift from formal Victorian evening dress to futuristic jumpsuits and, without blinking, to the tattered rags of a caveman. The light, the ambiance, the smell, and the texture of the air were constantly in flux. Thankfully, her opal necklace was the one consistency in her wardrobe.
Our marriage bed thudded to a halt. Mel was wearing a bright neon pink leotard, green leg warmers, and powder blue headband. Her hair was blown into an exaggerated column of fuzz. I was wearing a purple Adidas tracksuit and aviators.
It could not be any clearer — we had time-traveled to the ’80s.
Thumping bass and eerie synthesizers banged on the door to our bedroom-turned-time-machine. We opened it and found ourselves amid a raging disco. Mel grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the dance floor.
“What are you doing?!” I shouted.
“Loosen up already!” She yelled back.
We quickly picked up the rhythm, and before long, we were doing the Running Man, Roger Rabbit, and the Cabbage Patch like we belonged there. Sweat dripped down our faces and over our glittering jewelry as we danced for hours. Finally, after turning down the third gentleman who asked us to join him in the bathroom to do poppers, we grew tired of the ’80s. She led me through the door, conspicuously posted in the middle of the dance floor, and back into our time-jumping bedroom.
We each downed a glass of water and flopped onto the bed in an exhausted heap. The room started spinning once more.
For a while, we didn’t say anything. We just looked at one another and smiled. Her auburn hair, a blown mess before entering the maelstrom of bodies, was now sweaty and matted to her forehead. I could feel my love for her being rekindled.
As our time traveling bed soared throughout time and space, so did my perceptions of her. In one moment, I loved her like I did when we first met — giddy, bewildered, and excited. Butterflies danced in my stomach. A moment later, our love transformed into something profound and familiar. I knew at that moment that she always had been and always would be a part of me.
“Do you know what I could go for?” She asked. “A nice melty wheel of brie and some wine.”
“Why don’t we see what else the magic treehouse offers?”
As I said that, the bedroom stopped spinning again. Mel jumped onto my back, and we tumbled once more through the magic door.
Upon exiting our bedroom, we examined our new outfits. Mel wore a light blue dress with a beret and bone cigarette holder. I was wearing a single-breasted gray flannel suit and a matching stetson. Our outfits led us to believe we were somewhere in mid-century Europe, but the Arc de Triomphe looming over us confirmed that it was Paris.
“Care for an aperitif, madame?” I asked.
She puffed on her cigarette. The blue-tinged smoke billowed from her mouth and shrouded her face like a veil.
“Don’t mind if I do, monsieur.”
Arm in arm, we walked the streets of Paris in search of an open cafe. Rose scented air wafted through the streets. Spellbound by the twisting gothic spirals and the lavish renaissance homes, we wandered for thirty minutes before realizing the city was empty. Barred doors and shuttered windows were our only company.
“Maybe it’s some sort of holiday,” I proposed. “You know these Parisians and their extended vacations and all.”
Before she could respond, there was a thunderous crack, and the sky exploded into crimson. We climbed the steps of the nearest church tower and looked to the horizon. Soldiers were marching towards us in malevolent lockstep. Tanks followed the soldiers, and soon after, planes crested over the hills. The swastikas on their uniforms and flags confirmed what we had feared: it was June 14, 1940, and those were goddamn nazis heading for us.
We bolted down the steps, too terrified to speak. Our hands clasped together as we sprinted up the cobblestone streets towards the Arc De Triomphe, where we had left the time machine.
Nearly out of breath, we turned the last corner. To our dismay, the nazis had already streamed through and around the arc like thousands of angry fire ants.
To make matters worse, the door to our time machine was nowhere to be found.
“It was right here!” I screamed. “I know it was right here!”
“Maybe it moved?”
“It’s not a car! It’s not like we can just lose the magical time-machine-marriage-bed!”
“Stop screaming at me! You always do this when things get tense! Don’t take this out on me!” She tearily screamed. “It’s not my fault!”
“Oh my god, excuse me for being a little upset that we are almost certainly going to get killed by nazis! This isn’t exactly how I wanted this to turn out!”
Our marital spat drew the attention of a nearby nazi officer. Neither of us spoke German, but I imagine he said something along the lines of:
“Excuse me, Mr. and Mrs, I’m a nazi contributing to genocidal world domination, but even I am embarrassed for you right now. So stop airing your dirty laundry in public, for chrissakes.”
Or something like that.
Before the officer could finish screaming, Mel kicked him in his nazi balls and bolted for the nearest cafe. After regaining his composure, the nazi hobbled after us, shouting what I can only assume was more unsolicited marriage advice.
“It’s locked!” Mel yelled. We threw our combined weight against the door, but it didn’t budge.
“Oh god, we’re going to die!” I cried. “We’re going to get killed by real nazis, holy shit, holy shit –”
The terrifying crash of glass cut through the air. During my blubbering, Mel had taken a chair and smashed the cafe window. She reached through and unlocked the door.
We stumbled inside. Mel quickly slammed it shut and held her body against it. Then, after a few tense moments, we realized how quiet it was. There was no broken glass on the floor, no Nazis marching inexorably towards disaster outside our window, and nobody banging against the door trying to kill us.
We were thankfully back in our time-machine bedroom.
“What the hell was that!” She screamed.
“Me?!” I yelled. “You’re the one who ran off!”
“You were standing there doing nothing!” She yelled. She pulled at her hair and sat on the bed. “This right here is why we need therapy! Everything is all sunshine and roses until we hit any sort of roadblock! Then you melt down! Whether it’s my mom staying with us for a few extra days, nazis invading Paris, or asking you to take off your fucking shoes in the fucking living room.”
“I… Mel, please, I’m sorry I… I don’t like feeling like I hurt you.”
“Stop.”
“No, Mel, really, I’m –”
“You know every time you’re trying to make amends….” She sniffled. “…you start it off with ‘I’?
“How else can I say ‘I’m sorry’ without ‘I’ first?”
“Figures,” she scoffed and wiped the tears from her eyes. “You have no idea what I’m talking about.”
I was hurt by that and had nothing to say. I turned and sat on our marriage bed. After a moment, the door slammed shut. Mel was gone.
Time as a concept loses all meaning after traveling through it long enough. After a certain point, things blur together into one hazy meaningless blob, so I’ll do my best to explain how I spent the last few hundred years, give or take.
I went looking for her when I realized she wasn’t coming back. So I started in places that we had only dreamed of seeing and were inaccessible without the aid of the complicated, dark magic we had stumbled upon.
I visited Chicago during the 1893 world fair, Tudor England, pre-revolutionary France, and countless others hoping that I could hold her one more time and make amends.
Everywhere I went, I uncovered traces of her. I found her initials carved into the Parthenon, an empty pack of her favorite cigarettes at the foot of the pyramid of Giza, and a half-eaten turkey sandwich on a cliff near Niagara Falls.
Initially, I took these as clues that she wanted me to find her — little breadcrumbs that she had sprinkled throughout spacetime to test me. That was until I discovered her opal necklace outside the bed-chamber of Mark Antony.
I traveled back to our date in the woods where we had fallen in love, but it was all in vain. There were only the shadows of our lost love, playing on a loop like a sad old movie.
After that, I got the message. I spent the next unquantifiable period wandering the cosmos, spiraling into a typical bout of self-pity. I spent a couple of hundred years in the renaissance when I was trying to enrich myself, ancient Rome when I felt particularly hedonistic, and maybe a couple of decades in the distant future when I needed some perspective.
Eventually, even my non-stop time travel grew dull. I was stuck tumbling through infinity, and I missed my lover. So when I was feeling lonely, I often traveled back to when I was a child. I watched my old memories of my mom pushing me on a swing set and felt more whole. Like someone loved me.
Then it struck me. Mel didn’t leave behind the necklace to remind me of the autumn day we spent together, but rather what she told me that day. That day when I was fully listening to her.
I reentered the time machine and traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1996. Mel, my Mel, the one I had been scouring infinite cosmos for, was standing on the beach. She was watching a memory, just as I had many times over the past hundred years. It was the memory she had told me about on our date in the woods.
We watched the scene unfold together in silence.
Young Mel was throwing a ball with her Dad on the beach. The ball glanced off her fingertips, and a strong gust of wind took it. Her father’s voice pleaded with her to slow down, but it, just like the ball, was blown out to sea. The harder she swam towards the ball, the further it drifted.
Before she knew it, the land was a speck in the distance, and her legs were growing tired. Finally, exhaustion overcame her, and she sank into the emerald water. The light from the sun faded, and she was enveloped in a quiet, chilly darkness.
The next thing she remembered, she was on the beach coughing up gallons of salty water. The look in her father’s teary eyes conveyed a mixture of terror, relief, and love. She had told me she would never forget that look.
I walked up behind her and placed the opal necklace on her shoulder. She put her hand on mine and stroked it with her thumb.
“Took you long enough,” She said. “Another couple hundred years, and I would have thought about really leaving you.”
We stayed on the beach until sunset holding one another and trading stories of our escapades over the years we spent apart. Our stories were hilarious, thrilling, and often terrifying, but afterward we mostly just felt grateful to be whole again.
“I missed you,” I said.
The blood-orange sun was setting in the distance.
“I missed you too,” she said. “I just… I hope you understand that I needed some time.”
“Fortunately, that’s one thing we have plenty of.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Not anymore. There is nobody I’d rather float through eternity with.”
The sun dipped below the horizon, and we were shrouded in purple darkness.
After a moment, I asked, “So… what are you thinking for dinner?”
Millerwiller 