In the year 2020, I was nearly forty. I lived with my wife and our two kids. Once, I think I was happy in my marriage. Today, my wife and I go through the motions. It's never gotten so bad for either of us to step out, but it isn't the way it once was between us. It's a life that could have been different, had I made a different choice.

In 1990, I was nineteen and alive and living the last free summer between high school and the real world, a timeless limbo between the innocence of youth and the responsibility of adulthood. This is my moment. The one I can't forget. The one that plays over and over again in my head.

It had turned August and already, our last summer was ending. My friends and I would all be off to different places in the fall. It would be different after that, we knew, even if we couldn't admit it to one another.

I had known Alexis forever and had always wanted something more to happen between us. She was special to me and I to her. When at last, our summer was circling the drain and our friendship beginning to time out, we had one last night in my basement. A party with just our four closest friends. Alexis was going to stay over afterwards. I'd laid out a mattress on the floor by the couch. 

When the others left for the night, they glanced back at us with knowing smiles and winks. Leaving us alone like that. Everyone knew. Everyone but me. We were alone, side by side on the couch. We'd spent the whole night at one another's side and, now, with the whole room to ourselves we remained too close to be just friends, too far to be something more. My arm pressed against hers, my fingers deliberately away from her hand.

She looked at me.

Alexis had hazel eyes that changed with the light. They were brown flecked with green in the day and green colored by brown at night. They were totally unique.

I could feel words rising in my throat, feelings I shoved down again. This was the moment, the moment everything might have changed.

I leaned over. I leaned away. She slipped away to the mattress and went to sleep. Nothing.

Back in 1990, I'd wanted Alexis with everything I had. The missed moment still plays over and again in my head at night, sometimes in the doldrums of work during the day. Again and again, I wonder what would have happened had I leaned in.

In September 2020, a package wrapped in brown paper arrived on my stoop. No postage.

I took it inside and cut through the string. The paper came away like Christmas wrappings, shed around a polished mahogany box. The hinges creaked as I opened it, caked with rust. Photographs and letters spilled out from its depths. The first to catch my eye was a postcard. From Alexis. I would have recognized her handwriting anywhere. The old sensation rose in my throat, the same that comes whenever I think of her. I read it and never have before, though it was addressed to me. She signed it, "with love."

There were photographs of us. Polaroid. Developed. Digital prints. One at Lake Michigan. Another in Calgary. Places I could recognize only from the tourist signs in the background. There were pictures of family reunions dotted with unrecognizable faces. Romantic sunsets. One of her topless, covering her nipples and mouth with her arms, looking at the camera shyly. It took me a while to realize what I had found. Another life. One that never existed.

At the bottom, there was a single polaroid picture. Alexis strewn across a bed in pink and white panties. Scrawled on the back, "do you remember?"

The last thing to come out of the chest was a smaller package, wrapped and tied with string. My fingers shook to open it, dreading and hopeful. Inside, I found a note, carefully typed. It explained things that I could not understand. It explained how things could have been and taught me how to make it so.

I had been shipped a time machine. But there were no wires or gears or flux capacitors. It was simpler than that. All I had to do was think a certain way, meditate myself backward in the presence of things; things that had been ripped from another timeline. It would only work once, but it would let me live the other life for a while.

"This life will not be altered, but you will be forever changed," the note said with a sign-off. 

I don't know who sent me the package or how or why. But I had my suspicions.

In 1990, Alexis sits beside me on the couch in my basement. We almost are alone. Her bed is apart from mine. The last of our friends are ascending the stairs, looking back at me with a wink. Everyone knows. And so do I.

Now we are alone. Alexis looks at me and I let our hands intertwine. Her fingernails are flecked with pink polish. Her eyes green under the moon. Her eyes flick from mine to our hands.

I lean over, my lips nearly brush against hers. Her eyes flutter against mine. I kiss her.

It's 1990. I am nineteen and desperately in love with my best friend. In the year 2020, I will be married to her. In this instant, with her lips on mine, I can feel the weight of this timeline expanding out between us, unrolling like an endless tapestry. And I am living in every stitch. Every string. All at once.

In 1990, her lips envelope mine. Her little body is folded into my chest. Her kiss is uncertain, biting. I tease back, nibbling. Her tongue. My hand is in her hair and her scent is inside of me. I breathe a life with her, knowing as my hand rides up her back what will come.

In 2020, Alexis is in the shower, the door to our bedroom ajar. I slip inside. The frosted glass hides her face, but her form is there, filled out only a little since we were nineteen together, wrapped in August. I open the door. Alexis smiles. Her flashing green-brown eyes. Her body is different but the same. The marks of age and a lived life.  A small scar on her belly. The brown beauty mark beside her belly button. I step into the shower with her and my cock is hard against her side. My fingers grasp for the smooth skin between her legs. Her breath coming in slow sighs. White teeth flashing.

"Do you remember?" I breathe.

In 1990, my fingers loosen the strap of her bra. She comes away from me smiling. White teeth. Green-brown eyes that are familiar and new again. This is the first time. I lean her back into the couch cushion. Our lips meet again. No words pass. Her pelvis digs into mine, legs wrapping around my waist. I lift off her shirt. Small breasts tumble out. Brown spot by her belly button. I put my mouth on her, her fingers run through my hair.

Her jeans, tight flared, torn at the knee. I pry at them with my fingers until she does it for me. My shirt lifts off over my head, gets stuck. Our bodies press together, warm to warm.

On her knees in 2020, my wife Alexis has my cock in her mouth. Hot water streams around us. My fingers in her hair.

In 1990, Alexis's hand drifts to my crotch. I shed my pants. We are naked together. She holds my head to her chest and whispers my name. I echo with hers. I kiss her neck. Her cheeks. Her lips. I kiss her belly and her breasts. I kiss her stomach and she slides out of her panties, pink and white. I press my mouth between her legs, feel her wetness on my cheeks and in her soft bush. Our hands twine together. Her back arches.

Alexis's pussy grinds on my face. My tongue pushes into her. She tells me not to stop. The first words she has spoken but for my name. The words echo in my skull, through time.

In 2020, the shower is still running, but Alexis is spread on the counter. My hand on her throat. Her eyes pouring into me.

"Don't stop," she says. "Don't stop."

I enter Alexis for the first time with her eyes locked on mine and her legs wrapped around me. She draws me into her, letting out a long, slow breath. I bite her ear. I push into her and she holds on tighter, nails scraping my back. She's so wet. I pump into her softly at first, worried about making noise. Then harder. And harder. It's everything she can do not to cry out.

Our sweat mingled while our bodies began to stick together in our passion. We didn't stop. We only moved further and deeper into one another. Our mouths were locked together. She tasted sweet. I never wanted to stop.

Thirty years later, it would be much the same. Alexis and I moved from the bathroom to the bed, hardly taking a hand from one another. We collapsed into the sheets and I entered her. We formed one being, locked by the hip and mouth and mind. It was a love bound together by years of memories of her. Naked. Together. On trips. Getting married. Fucking. Nothing lost between us. But it couldn't last. Already, the memory is beginning to fade. Another 2020, a different present, is forming again in my mind. A different wife. A different life.

On a dirty basement couch in 1990, I hold Alexis's naked body to mine. Her legs are still shaking, my cum inside of her. We kiss. It is the beginning and the end. In my mind, thirty years of experience are in that moment, her consuming green-brown eyes. 

In 2020, Alexis is asleep in bed. A brown paper package arrives at my door. I untie it with fumbling fingers, spilling out postcards and letters from another woman. Photos from another life. As I remember, the world around me fades. Alexis slips away. The timeline collapses.

In the year 2020, I have my wife, my two kids. But I also have an afternoon in the summer of 1990. An afternoon that never was and always has been with Alexis. At night, I lay in bed beside my wife and replay it over and again in my mind. I remember once when the memory was a fantasy, but I remember now the way it felt. The way she whispered my name in my ear. The brown spot by her belly button. Sometimes, I remember more. Fragments of a different life. Not better, but different.

I still have the package tucked secretly away, but no amount of meditation sends me back to that afternoon. Sometimes, my heart aches for her. For that other 2020. But I know who sent the package now. One day, I will see it again.