The Cost of Remembering

I never went back to the times we had sex. In my mind, I had, of course. But in real life, I couldn’t go there. It felt like a violation.

So I went back to our second kiss. It had happened the day after our first kiss, and I barely had time to worry if I would ever see her again. She’d texted me as soon as my key was in the ignition, and I’d checked it fast in the silence of my car.

Tomorrow? she’d written, Industry Beach?

But that was only in my memory, which was riddled with holes. I couldn’t remember the feel of my car’s interior, for instance. It must’ve been gray, my whole car was gray, but the feeling was lost on me. I’d gotten rid of that car nearly ten years ago, and I never wasted time travel going back to its interior. The only good thing that ever happened in there, after all, was sex.

I went to Industry Beach, October 3rd, 2012. The beach was sprawling and empty, and the air crisp but not cold. The familiar scent of sand damp from the morning’s rain filled my nose.

She was already there, by the water, waiting for me. I saw her red hair blowing like a persistent flame in the wind, and I ran to her across the beach, my feet sinking hard into the thick sand. Finally, by the coastline, the ground firmed up, and I could hear her delighted voice above the white noise of the waves.

“Jonathan!”

The kiss was a crash like the waves were, and I thought about how poetic it would’ve been if we united at the same second a cresting wave had collapsed on the shore. But no matter how many times I visited our second kiss, I couldn’t open my eyes and observe the waves. I couldn’t focus on anything but her lips and her hair and the scent of her skin laced with some layered floral aroma that I only ever smelled on her.

As we pulled apart, I took her hand, and tears might’ve streamed down my face if I could move freely, but I couldn’t, because back then I hadn’t cried. I’d thought only about the softness of her palm and the light, fluttering touch of her fingers.

When I returned to the present, I was lying atop my comforter in my dim bedroom that was littered with so much stuff. Every surface was covered in knickknacks, unmatched socks, old receipts, empty water bottles, photographs, bygone birthday cards, and tangled chargers for who-knows-what electronic. I couldn’t let anything go anymore. Throwing things out meant the possibility of losing their memory. My ability only allowed me entrance into times I could recall.

I sat up and slid into a seated position at the side of my bed. My right hand rested by an off-putting stain on my comforter, a scar from the time I awoke from a night of barhopping with her and instantly heaved my guts out. I wished I could go back in time to prevent that untreatable stain, but that’s not how it worked. I could relive the past, but I couldn’t change it.

The bedroom door clicked shut behind me as I made my way barefoot across the dusty wood floor to the bathroom and examined the drops of toothpaste on the mirror, not wanting to see my reflection. I had long ago disconnected from him. I was 35, but I’d just been 22, and the difference between those faces was far greater than I wanted to admit. Besides, I needed to get moving. I’d lost no time galavanting around in the past—I always returned to the exact moment as I’d left. But in the present, I had only an hour before my date arrived.

All I knew about her was that she had red hair, according to the app, and that fit my criteria for perfection.

The shower spigot’s spray scalded my skin. There was no sand on my body; I couldn’t take anything back with me from my travels. But I still felt dirty with it. So I turned the cold water knob until the flow was lukewarm—too-hot and too-cool were the only settings besides freezing—and took to scrubbing. My skin was paler than I remembered, but perhaps I was comparing my legs to when they were sun-kissed in my second date board shorts.

When I toweled myself off, I looked at the time on my phone. I’d already lost a half hour; there wouldn’t be enough time to cook. I ordered a pizza and a side of garlic knots from across the street.

The order arrived without the side. Just pizza. I sighed.

When the buzzer sounded in my apartment, I had shaved my face, combed back my thinning hair, and donned a button down all without looking in the mirror. My face went hot, and I took a deep, steadying breath, bracing myself for my first go at an app date.

I opened the door.

The woman waiting behind it looked like her pictures. She was in her early thirties and had the same narrow face I recognized from the app’s photo gallery, the same powdery complexion and upturned nose. But her hair was brown.

“You changed your hair,” I said, a poor attempt at a greeting. I regretted it, even before I saw her eyebrows furrow in annoyance.

“You look older than your pictures,” she snipped, but her playful smirk helped soften the blow of her retort.

I stepped aside, letting her into my apartment through the cluttered living room into the dining area which, in my cramped apartment, was just a square table crammed in the corner of my meager kitchen. Two narrow wooden stools were pulled up to the table, backless so I could tuck them under it when I had no guests, which was most of the time.

Spotting the pizza box, wilted and soggy with grease, she scrunched her brows again.

“I thought you said you were cooking,” she remarked, and her tone was more deflated than annoyed. A twinge of guilt twisted in my stomach.

“Yeah, sorry,” I said. “I’m a decent cook, but I’m terrible with time.”

We ate in near silence until I coaxed myself into conducting a stilted conversation that both of us failed to feign interest in.

I watched her choke down a wet drooping slice, eyeing me with a wary look and glancing periodically at the glowing microwave clock. As soon as the clock read 9:00pm, she left.

Alone again, I sank into my couch. There was a digital clock in my living room below the television screen, and I stared at the red blinking colon between the nine and the zeros, feeling myself slipping further and further from Caroline. Choosing to stay in the present was like warming my hands by a lightbulb when a bonfire was nearby. Who would choose the dim and buzzing thing when they could have crackling, furious glory?

I released myself into the past. This time I visited my very first date with Caroline. When it was done, I stayed to visit Industry Beach again. The following day blurred by, when I didn’t see her but felt giddy with potential.

The present was futile. I repeated our relationship on a loop for what could’ve been decades; I wasn’t sure. I stopped counting. I stopped skipping the bad parts. I just lived it, almost forgetting that there was life beyond the continuous, captivating cycle of Caroline.

The last day of the cycle was November 12, 2015. I always started over on that day, because November 13 was breakup day.

Unlucky number 13.

With her in my arms in the bed we shared, the 12th slipped easily into the 13th. I didn’t forget that I was supposed to leave. But the morning of the 13th had only ever happened once, and I was hungry to have an experience that was so close to new.

When I awoke, her thigh was draped on top of the comforter, and I was transfixed by a black ant journeying along the soft hill of her skin. I collected it gingerly with my hand, wanting to cry at how gently she stirred when I touched her. Her skin twitched, muscles tensing for the length of a breath before releasing back into slumber.

Somehow, I slid out from under her and began to dress. That move reminded me that I was a mere stowaway in my past body. If the current me had been steering the ship, I would’ve stayed in bed.

I made my way to the kitchen, a more spacious place than the one I had in the present. Wide paneled windows welcomed the morning sun in long rectangles of warm light stretching across the tile. By the time I brewed a pot of coffee, Caroline had climbed noiselessly into a barstool at the counter, her red hair haloed in the sunlight and messy with sleep.

I couldn’t imagine we’d actually break up that day. That couldn’t be right. I loved her too much.

But the fighting started as it had before. Her fingers were tapping on the white enamel of the countertop in the urgent way they did when she was annoyed. I slid a coffee mug across the bar toward her hand and she paused her anxious habit long enough to catch it.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“You did it again, didn’t you, Jonathan?” She said, pinching the bridge of her narrow nose. “I thought we agreed you’d stop doing it.”

I begged my younger self not to turn away from her, but still I did. I reached into the cabinet to grab a box of cereal.

“I didn’t,” I mumbled toward the box.

“You didn’t just go back right now?”

“No,” I told her, my voice a pitch higher with annoyance. It was true. I hadn’t time traveled in that particular moment.

She let out a long, loud sigh.

“When were you?” she demanded.

I turned back to her, the cereal box clamped in my fist.

“I wasn’t,” I insisted. Don’t say it, my present self hissed in my mind. But the words slipped out. “Just last night, ok? I traveled last night.”

“In bed?” she shrieked, scandalized. “I was in bed with you!”

I shrugged. She folded her arms tight across her chest, a gesture that fell somewhere between furious disapproval and holding herself together.

“So?” I asked, circling around the counter to face her.

“So, I don’t like what it does to you.” She turned her head from me, toward the tiled floor, and my present heart ached despite past Jonathan steeling himself with stony resolution.

“I can’t go for more than a few seconds, a minute tops. How could it change me that much?” I demanded. This was true. I hadn’t, at this time, mastered the art of staying.

“I don’t know how. All I know is that it does. You blink your eyes and they seem different. When did you go?”

I didn’t respond.

“Last night, in my bed. When did you go?”

“In my bed,” I corrected her.

My present self was internally screaming, Just tell her! but my past self couldn’t hear it. I hadn’t gone anywhere important. My refusal to tell her I was visiting the science museum as an eight-year-old hand-in-hand with my deceased mother was simply out of stubbornness. I didn’t want to be vulnerable while she was chastising me in her twittering tone that always drove me insane.

“It was less than thirty seconds,” I intoned.

“I’m going to say this one last time,” Caroline warned. Past Jonathan stood erect while somewhere inside him my present self, his time traveling passenger, crumpled. She slid out from her stool and leaned her face close to mine. I begged my eyes at least to close, to shut this all out, but of course, they wouldn’t.

She spoke low and clear when she said, “It’s me or the time travel.”

I couldn’t take it anymore.

I blinked awake on my couch at 9pm, in the year 2025. Bleary-eyed and squinting, I gripped the seat cushion of the couch for stability. My living room was familiar, but at the same time disorienting. The whole place seemed duller somehow and slightly out of focus.

A knock sounded at my door, light and uncertain. I stood up to the painful discovery that my knees were aching. I didn’t realize what a toll the travel could take on my body. I’d never spent so long in the past.

I opened the door. A woman stood before me, mid thirties, with dyed brown hair. She was the woman from the app, many decades ago—or rather, just a moment before the present. She looked about herself, confused.

“Oh, I must have the wrong door,” she said, her face flushing red. She looked pretty with the flush in her cheeks. “I was just on this date and left my umbrella—now I must be turned around.”

“No, it’s me,” I said and forced a smile, thinking of what Caroline had told me. Maybe time travel did change me.

The woman smiled as if I were making a joke. Then she scanned up and down my body and took a step backward, holding her hands up as if fending off a robber. Beads of nervous sweat sprouted by her hairline, where I could see a tiny line of red beneath the dye.

“Come in,” I said, “Let’s find your umbrella. Is it raining now?”

I took a step aside to let her pass, but I’d forgotten about the ache in my knees and the pain shocked me. I let out a yelp and felt myself swerve wildly to the side, losing any balance I had left.

She screamed as I crashed into a pile on the ground.

***

I tried to call out, to ask what was going on, but my words were slurred by my sudden and inexplicable lack of teeth. My eyelids were heavy, but I blinked them open. There was a man standing over me, and as my eyes focused on the sterile white room beyond him, I realized he was a nurse.

“He’s awake,” the nurse’s gruff voice sounded, and he turned without looking at me to stalk out the door. I watched the empty threshold, dumbfounded and exhausted. A dull pain hummed in every one of my muscles.

Caroline walked in. I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand in disbelief, blinking back the sudden threat of tears.

Were the past and present bleeding together? At first, she looked exactly as she had the day she left. But as I stared, I noticed a few differences. Refracted flecks of light dancing across the white walls emanated from a glittering rock on her most significant finger. Plus, there were lines bracketing her lips that had never been so deep before. This was the present.

“Jonathan,” she sighed at me. She took the chair by my bedside and my breath quickened. Her arm stretched outward, and I thought she might lean in for an embrace when her fingers met with the hard plastic of an object on the side table beside my bed.

“Look.”

She held a mirror in front of my face, and there were no specks of toothpaste on the glass to keep my eyes from focusing on the man looking back at me. It was an older man, with deep bags under his eyes and long, sagging jowls. The eyes of this old man were the same hazel as mine, with veins like tree roots sprouting out around the iris.

“I told you to stop,” she scolded, and I blinked, confused. The tears finally spilled from my eyes, and the man in the mirror cried too.

“How long were you traveling?” she demanded, all the gentleness drained from her tone.

I calculated. We broke up a month and a half after our third anniversary, and I’d relived the majority of our relationship about a dozen times.

“30… Maybe 40 years,” I told her. My voice was quivering and soft. She nodded solemnly, lips in a flat line.

“The doctors say have the medical workup of a 75-year-old man. So that checks out,” she said.

My mouth fell open.

“Do what the doctors say, Jonathan.” She stood up from the chair, and took a step toward the door. The rock on her hand bounced light from the window that flickered across my vision, blinding me, “And for god’s sake, stop with the time travel.”

I summoned all the energy that remained in my aching body to lean forward and watch as she made her way toward the door. I wanted to memorize how she moved. She turned back to me, eyes glowing with pity and, if I wasn’t imagining it, brimming with tears.

“And take me off your emergency contact list.”

She was gone.

A doctor marched in. He tried to make sense of my rapid aging with a rundown of several rare genetic disorders and something to do with my thyroid. He said he could give me fifteen, maybe twenty good years if I followed his instructions, took his pills, and went to a therapist for whatever this talk about time travel was. He told me to stick with him.

I closed my eyes and she walked back in, red hair and conspicuous lines curved by her lips.

She sighed, “Jonathan.”

And she walked back in, red hair and conspicuous lines curved by her lips.

She sighed, “Jonathan.”

And she walked back in…