The first time we traveled through time, it was an accident.
He was getting rid of old documents. His marriage certificate from his first marriage. His hand touched mine, a smile flickered across his mouth, and he passed the paper through the shredder.
And suddenly we weren’t in our home, anymore. We weren’t anywhere I recognized. The wooden panels on the wall were ancient, from another era. The harsh lighting reflected off the name plate gleaming on the judge’s bench. In the center of the room stood a man in black robes, two men in suits, and two women in dresses. One wore a red dress with white flowers printed on the skirt, and she watched the couple who had their hands joined before the judge with rapt attention. The other woman wore a lacy white sheath that hung down to her ankles. Baby’s breath stuck out of the braid falling over one shoulder. A smile dusted her lips.
I couldn’t see the men’s faces. I could only hear the voice of the man who held the woman’s hands.
I do, he said, and it was nearly a gasp. The sound of his voice… I would have known that musical tone anywhere.
“Phillip?” I questioned, and my voice echoed, strangely, distorted, distant, in the room. He didn’t turn his head to find me, but fingers suddenly threaded through mine, and I looked to my right. Phillip—an older, casually dressed, familiar Phillip—stood beside me, confusion written on his face, glowing in his eyes and twisting his mouth. I tore my eyes away from him when I heard the peal of the woman’s voice repeating his words.
I do.
The memory dissolved, and we were in our bedroom again, him in the teal desk chair next to our bed, and me perched on the ocean-blue quilt spread over our full-sized bed. His face still contorted in bewilderment, and I gasped for breath.
“What was that?” I asked.
Slowly, we pieced together what happened.
It took a few tries to figure it out. Not every piece of paper had such a potent memory attached to it. But some—pictures, birthday cards, plane tickets, driver’s licenses—had strong emotions tied to them, and so, when we shredded them, we relived the memories made in those moments when the card was signed, the photo snapped, the plane boarded. We relived goodbye’s, triumphs, kisses.
And then we stopped.
We knew, of course, the option was always there. We took better care of that shredder than we did ourselves. It remained in pristine condition. But we knew reliving those memories cost us the ability to keep the mementos, and remember at our leisure.
Then he got in the car accident.
He got better, at first. It didn’t kill him. It caused injuries that required multiple surgeries, but he should have survived. The surgeries went wrong, though. A perfect storm of tragedy. He would fix one issue only to be faced with another. Over and over. Finally, he signed the DNR. Do not resuscitate. He was ready to die.
He succumbed to a stroke. Brain death occurred, followed swiftly by cardiac death. They were helpless to save him.
I couldn’t let him go.
I wanted to let him go.
When I decided to go back, it was because I needed to say goodbye. I never got to do that, here in the present, because he died so suddenly—one moment he was here, the next he was gone, a flat line on a monitor. And now I wanted to say goodbye, more than anything.
It started so innocently.
I just wanted to hear him laugh again. That was the entire thing. We kept all the mementos instead of shredding them because we wanted to remember the memories attached to them over and over again, not relive them once.
Now he was gone, and the memories weren’t enough. We thought we’d have more time to remember instead of relive, but we were wrong. I needed to touch him. Feel his heartbeat. Smell his skin. Listen to his voice float in the air like music notes. I needed him, for just a few more minutes, and then I could say goodbye. I could let him rest.
I needed to go back. I would have traded every memento I had for more time.
I sat on my bedroom floor surrounded by documents in boxes. Everything I had that belonged to him. We kept everything once we knew what it meant to have it. I had cards for every occasion, plane tickets from every trip, tickets from every movie date, photos of so many moments we wanted captured forever. Or, in this case, moments I wanted for a few seconds more.
The first piece of paper I grabbed was a card from my birthday. I didn’t think; I grabbed it and shoved it through the shredder and waited to be taken back.
It took less time than it took me to take a breath.
Marie.
I almost collapsed. My knees weakened, shook with the strain of holding up my body, and tears sprang to my eyes. I couldn’t breathe around the stone in my throat.
He laughed, handing me the card. I watched myself look at him skeptically, wary of the card since it had become a joke in years past to give me the worst card he could find, regardless of what it was for.
But this was my twenty-fifth birthday. I was a quarter of a century old. This, to him, was noteworthy. For twenty-five years, he said, his favorite person had a heartbeat.
The card had a rose on it. Embossed with gold lettering. For the love of my life, it said. For the love the world knows because of you.
I know what love is because of you, he wrote. I watched myself read the words, watched myself lean forward and kiss him. His hands reached out and grabbed my belt loops and pulled me closer.
I reached to try and touch him.
I caught myself on the carpet of my bedroom floor. A cry ripped from my throat and my hands clenched around the next reachable sheaf of paper. Down the shredder it went, and I was hugging him tightly in the airport before he passed through security, kissing him over and over before he left me for a month to go to stay with his sick and dying father.
He vanished before I could even say goodbye.
My hands kept searching for him. My body ached with every lost touch. I tore through the memories, thoughtless, careless. The only thing that mattered was seeing him again, touching him again, even though I never could. I was always reaching, reaching, and never connecting. I didn’t care. I kept going.
My ears rang with his words in every memory.
Happy birthday.
Merry Christmas.
Dance with me!
Give me the camera, Marie.
Kiss me.
I chased him across years. Through hotels, bars, restaurants, airports, apartments, and hospitals.
I didn’t care until there was nothing left.
Nothing except the DNR.
I hesitated when my hands found it. When it was the last thing in the bottom of the last box sitting on the floor between his desk and our bed. I hesitated, finally, because this was the last thing he ever signed. All the memories culminated in this, his final days, his final thoughts, his final wishes.
I couldn’t stop myself.
I was back in his hospital room before I even realized what I was doing. The shredder whirred somewhere in the back of my mind, but I was staring at him in his hospital bed, and I was staring at me, clutching at his hand while I sat in the chair beside his bed. He was staring at the ceiling, pained.
I want to let you go, I thought.
I love you, I said.
His eyes snapped down to me, vivid and alive in his sallow face, and he smiled, the expression beaming across his face, splitting his mouth open wide so surprised laughter tumbled from his lips. His eyes gleamed, danced in the dim light, looked for all the world like the place I’d spend my life yearning to drown in, and the place I’d never get to see in this reality.
I love you, too, he said, and he pulled me in to kiss him. He kissed me passionately, deeply, his desire unfurling from his mouth and engulfing me. The heat of his love overwhelmed the heat from his fever. His mouth moved against mine and nothing else mattered. Not the cords and wires, not the pain, not the fear.
Everything soft inside me wilted, crumbled beneath his touch. I was water in his arms, adjusting my shape to his hold. His hands on my skin unraveled me, turned me into something softer, more fragile than I ever imagined I could be. I wanted to stay there, in that moment, forever.
Around me, the memory dissolved. His skin faded from beneath my fingertips. My lips tingled where his touched mine, but soon I was alone in my room again, with only the ghost of his love impressed upon my body.
“I want to let you go,” I whispered.
I wept.
I buried my face in my hands, keening alone in the lamplight. The shredder sat in front of me, silent and full-to-bursting. I wished, suddenly, that I could take it all back. Put all the pieces back together and have every photo, receipt, ticket, and paper back in a box in the back of my closet for me to cling to when I had nothing else.
Because I had nothing else, anymore. He was dead, and I had shredded every memory of him for moments that weren’t real anymore. I traded all my memories for nothing.
My cries bounced off the walls while I turned every box over. I looked in vain for anything left, and found nothing.
I collapsed on the floor, and screamed through my tears, muffled the sound behind my hand in case his ghost was listening. I didn’t want him to know what I’d done. I kicked the box in front of me while I sobbed, and I heard the faintest flap of paper.
My heart stopped. I lunged for it, flipped it back over and reached in blindly.
My fingers found the last piece of paper at the bottom of the box, crumpled it in my haste to grab it and hold it safely in my palm. I pulled it out, unfolded its torn, faded, wrinkled edges. A receipt. A receipt he kept in his wallet from our first date. Holding it, I was reminded of the day I found it, and I teased him for his sentimentality.
That was the moment I knew, he’d defended himself. That was the moment I knew I was going to marry you.
I laughed. That moment? When I tripped and almost fell into the booth?
No. The moment before. You smiled at me. You looked at me like I was the only person in the room… the only person on the planet. From that moment on I was yours.
I stared through my tears at the small white paper. It had a bottle of wine on it and two orders of salmon. I remembered the evening clearly. His lame shellfish joke. The way he slid his hand into mine while we walked beneath the twinkle lights back to his car. His smile when I kissed him at the end of the night, delirious, as if I made him drunk with happiness.
I stared at the receipt, and I remembered everything.
The shredder found its death in the swing of a baseball bat. The bat belonged to Phillip. When I touched it, I remembered the first time he taught me how to swing it.
I didn’t miss the shredder the way I thought I would. I didn’t ache for the past it gave me. I felt relieved. I felt as if I let go of a stone tied to my shoulders and dragging me down, and for the first time since Phillip died, I felt like I could breathe.
Because I was his. And he would always be mine, because no matter what point in time we were at… I would always, always remember him.