I Look For You Throughout Time, But I Cannot Find You

I thought I saw you again today. The girl had long blonde hair that fell past her shoulders and blew in the wind as she passed; she even wore the kind of skirt you would have liked, all flamboyant flair in its multi-colored hues. But then she turned her head towards me and the illusion broke: those eyes, blue as ocean waves, were not yours.

I moved on with regret sinking like a stone in my chest.

You would think I would realize the truth after all this time. You cannot reclaim the past, no matter how much you may wish it. I once thought I had nothing to lose, but one brush with bad luck and misfortune was enough to steal you away. And I’ve been looking for you ever since in every blonde-haired woman that has come my way.

I didn’t realize that seeing you fall backward in time would do this to me. It’s been years already—years of my own time, years of toil and strife and stress—while I’ve done everything I can to stay in the present moment. I do my meditation exercises like my therapist says I should do to keep my mind empty and relaxed. To them—to all of them—you simply disappeared. You’ve become a statistic in the realm of missing people.

They don’t know what I saw, what I have gone to books and ephemera and even the realm of speculative meanderings to unwind. They don’t know that I saw you one last time before the air behind you broke apart into a whirlpool and sucked you back into the murky realms of time and space. I only know enough about it because fiction—of all things!—helped me make sense of what happened to you.

It’s strange, and it’s sad, and I don’t know what to do with the knowledge I have.

What would you do if you were here? Would you play the sleuth and help me reconfigure what I witnessed even despite my mind telling my eyes that they could not have seen what they saw? I still remember it so clearly: the way the air shimmered and rippled before undulating in waves that swept you up with a force that left your eyes rolling back into your head. I screamed your name, but it was pointless.

You were gone before my scream ended.

Then I crumpled to my knees right there, a sob escaping my throat before I reached for my cell phone. But what could emergency services do for a paranormal disappearance? Because that was what I could make sense of then: what had happened was unnatural, the stuff of nightmares, and you had gone the way of ghosts.

When I finally collected myself with a harsh breath, I rose to my feet and stared at the empty space in our backyard where you had been. Gone, gone, gone. Just like that.

Just like that.

And there was no point in calling anyone, even though I alerted the authorities as soon as I could trust my voice not to tremble. For a while, they couldn’t ascertain whether there had been foul play or not, but eventually they uncovered no evidence to charge me with any role in your disappearance. I was simply an unfortunate married man whose wife had left in the evening only to never come back home.

Your family didn’t understand it. I had no answers for them; I just broke down in tears whenever your father pressed me for information I did not have. Even then, I only delved into books as an escape, not daring myself to put the pieces together of what truly had happened to you in those scattered moments when we should have been getting ready for bed inside the house.

But I can still see you standing at the back door, the knob in your hand before you opened the door and said, “Something’s out there. Do you hear it?”

I still don’t know what you heard, what called you out into the dark. I will probably never know—at least until the day I find you again.

I look for you in every crowd, try to find your usual expressions in strangers’ faces. But it’s useless. It’s as if I’m looking for a ghost. It’s as if you’ve died.

I don’t want to live a life without you, but I fear I must to go on for my own sanity.

Life stands still while I wait for you to come back. From where, I do not know. From which direction, I have no idea.

But I still walk through every room, waiting for you because I have no clues to find you.

The only glimmer of hope I had was through an esoteric short story I found online. It was called “The Multilayered Experience of Time”—something I would never have found if I hadn’t gone down a rabbit hole online one night when the insomnia grew to be too much to ignore. I couldn’t spend another night staring at the ceiling as thoughts raced through my brain at a mile a minute.

The story followed a scientist who uncovered the ability to travel through time, but he kept the information a secret from his wife. That indiscretion proved to be his undoing, however, when she discovered the time machine in the basement. And of course she used it. Of course she did.

But I fear your story wasn’t so straightforward. Something called you outside. Something pulled you back through time. But I have no way of knowing where to start about how to find you again.

I keep waiting for the universe to send me clues, but there are none.

Yesterday my therapist gave me information about a grief counseling group. He knows the antidepressants do only so much, and I need to talk things through.

But the worst part? I can’t talk about what I can’t make sense of myself.

And so there’s always this silent agony. You, out there somewhere, maybe floating in another realm.

And me, here, stuck on mundane planet Earth while greater things happen somewhere I can’t see.

I can’t keep looking for you in every crowd.

But I also know I just can’t stop.

You’re somewhere lost in time, and I can’t find you no matter how hard I squint.

Seeing isn’t knowing, after all, and looking isn’t finding.

But I fear I’ll always be lost without you.