The Twenty-Five Windows

The surface of Lake Michigan didn’t just reflect the sun; it vibrated with it. Each ripple caught the light in a rhythmic, golden pulse—a visual heartbeat. To anyone else, it was a beautiful Tuesday afternoon. To me, that glimmer was the exact frequency of his laugh. It was the way his eyes crinkled in our fourteenth life when we owned that small vineyard in Tuscany, and the way he looked at me across a smoky tavern in our third.

We have spent twenty-five lives together. We’ve been paupers and poets, soldiers and silk-weavers. In every iteration, the universe tried to pull us apart, and in every iteration, we broke the laws of physics to find the other. I once followed him into the mud of a hundred-year war, disguised as a squire, just so I could be the one to wash the salt from his brow.

But this life... this life is the silence.

The Elders were firm: his soul had grown complacent. He had relied on my strength for too long, skipping the solitary lessons of endurance. To keep our tether from snapping, he had to walk a path alone. He was sent down into the "Great Forgetfulness." I, however, was cursed with the "Great Recall." I remember every kiss. I remember the way he tastes like rain and clove. I remember the specific weight of his hand on the small of my back—a weight that currently exists only as a ghost-limb sensation.

I have become a ghost while still wearing skin.

There is a specific kind of masochism in watching the person who is the other half of your soul grow a garden with someone else. I was there, hidden behind a trellis of ivy, the day he met her at that street fair. I saw the way he tripped over his words—the same way he did in 1842 when he tried to ask for my hand in the rain. I sat in the back pew of the church during their wedding, veiled in a hat that felt more like a funeral shroud. When he said "I do," the air in the sanctuary turned to ash in my mouth. He didn't know that the "forever" he was promising her was a drop of water compared to the ocean of "forevers" he had already given to me.

Then came the child. A daughter. I watched them through the window of a bistro across from the park. He held the infant with a terrified tenderness. I felt a phantom weight in my own arms, remembering the three sons we raised in the Highlands, and the daughter we lost to the fever in the year of the great frost. He was using the same lullaby—a wordless humming that vibrated against the baby’s skull. He thinks he’s inventing it. He doesn't know it’s an echo of a melody we composed together before the earth was even cool enough to walk upon.

I saw them at the grocery store once. I stood three aisles away, hidden by boxes of cereal, just to watch him pick out apples. He checked for bruises with such focus—the same focus he used when he was a clockmaker in Prague, his hands steady and sure. I watched him reach out and tuck a stray hair behind her ear. It was a casual gesture. To him, it was a Tuesday habit. To me, it was a knife. I remember when that hand used to tremble when it touched my face. I remember when he told me my skin was the only map he ever needed to study. Now, he uses those hands to carry paper bags and hold a child that isn't ours.

When he jogs past my bench, the air doesn't just move; it shifts. My entire body tries to lean toward him, a flower following a sun it hasn't seen in an age. It is an evolutionary pull, a command written into my DNA. My muscles ache with the effort of staying still. I have to grip the wood of the bench until my splinters draw blood, just to keep from crying out his name—the name I gave him in a language that died before the Roman Empire rose.

I stood up from my bench, my legs feeling like lead. I couldn’t watch him jog past today. It was too much—the way he hit the pavement with such purpose, unaware that the woman sitting ten feet away had died in his arms three centuries ago. I turned toward the coffee shop, the air thick with the "fumes" of a love that had nowhere to go. It was a phantom gas, suffocating and sweet. I was halfway across the pavement when the wind caught my scarf—a silk wrap the color of the lake—and pulled it from my shoulders.

"You dropped this!"

The voice hit me like a physical blow. It wasn't just a sound; it was a resonance I felt in my marrow. The voice of my husband. My sun. My oxygen. My life.

I turned. There he was. His face was the same, yet his eyes were vacant of the centuries we shared. He held the silk toward me, his fingers brushing the fabric I had worn specifically because he loved this shade of blue in 1920.

"Thank you," I whispered. I forced a smile, though it felt like my skin might crack.

The angels had warned me: Do not interfere. Do not trigger the memory. If I forced the realization, his lesson would be voided, and we would both be cast into the void—a life without end and without each other.

He didn't move. He didn't hand me the scarf and walk away. He stayed, his hand still outstretched, his brow furrowing in a way that made my chest ache. The Lake Michigan sun caught the water behind him, throwing a halo of glimmers around his head.

"Sorry," he stammered, his voice dropping an octave. "I... I feel like I know you. That sounds like a line, I know. I’m married, I don't mean it like that. It’s just... have we met? At a conference? A gallery?"

We met at the beginning of time, I wanted to scream. You promised you’d find me even in the dark. You swore we would spend every life together. Our souls are intertwined; they glimmer brighter than the stars.

"I get that a lot," I said instead. My voice was a thin wire, vibrating with the effort not to break. "I have one of those faces. A 'past life' face, maybe."

He chuckled, but it was a nervous, hollow sound. "Maybe. It’s strange. For a second, when you turned around, I thought I knew you from somewhere." He looked toward the water, squinting at the intense glimmer. "The light on the lake... It's bright today, isn't it?"

When he looked at me, for that one second, the universe held its breath. The "Void" wasn't just a threat from the angels; it was a physical coldness creeping up my spine. But his eyes searched mine with a desperate, frantic hunger he couldn't name. He looked like a man trying to read a book in a language he used to speak in a dream.

"It’s a heartbeat," I said before I could stop myself.

I saw his throat move as he swallowed. He felt it. Deep in the sediment of his soul, beneath the "Great Forgetfulness," the spark I planted there centuries ago flared up. He wanted to reach for me. I could see his fingers twitch. And that is the true cruelty of my life: I have to be the one to break the connection. I have to be the one to reject the man who died a thousand times to find me, all to save him from a fate he doesn't even believe in.

"Yeah," he said, startled. "It is. Exactly like that."

I reached out and took the scarf. Our fingers brushed—a millisecond of contact. To him, it was static electricity. To me, it was a lightning strike of twenty-five lifetimes of intimacy. I saw the flash of a cottage in the woods, a penthouse in New York.

His eyes widened. A flicker of something moved behind his pupils—a spark of the man who had sworn never to forget me. The void felt very close then, a cold shadow creeping at the edges of the sunny pier.

"I have to go," I said, stepping back.

"Wait—I didn't get your name."

"It doesn't matter," I told him, turning my back so he wouldn't see the first tear fall. "I’ll see you in the next one."

I walked away, the glimmer of the water blinding me. I would wait. I had waited through plagues and revolutions; I could wait through one life of him being hers because I knew, with the certainty of the tides, that when he finally closed his eyes in this world, he would open them in the next and say my name. And then, finally, I would be able to breathe again, too.

I went back home to August. August is a man made of solid earth and predictable schedules. He smells like bergamot and expensive laundry detergent. When he wraps his arms around me, it’s a protective gesture—a sturdy fence built around a vacant lot. I don’t gasp for air when he touches me because he doesn’t take my breath away; he merely occupies the space where my breath used to be.

He thinks he knows me. He knows I like my eggs over-easy. He knows I prefer the window seat. He knows my college GPA and my favorite color. But he doesn't know that my soul is older than the tectonic plates beneath his feet. On Wednesday nights, over artisan pasta and a glass of red wine, I look at August across the candlelit table and feel like a criminal. He is an accountant; he deals in balances, in things that add up. How could I ever explain to him that I am a mathematical impossibility? That I am a woman carrying the grief of twenty-five widows?

"You're quiet tonight," August says, his hand reaching for mine. His palm is warm, dry, and entirely devoid of the electric current that used to make my hair stand on end when he would simply walk into a room.

"Just the lake," I lie, the words tasting like salt. "The light was very bright today. It gave me a bit of a headache."

"You spend too much time there," August says gently. He means it out of love. He wants me to be present here, in this century, in this kitchen. He doesn't realize he’s asking me to settle for a flickering candle when I’ve spent eons dancing in the sun.

When the wine hits my bloodstream, the barriers thin. In the hazy twilight of intoxication, the apartment changes. The modern furniture bleeds into the stone walls of a cottage in 17th-century Scotland. The sound of the traffic outside becomes the crashing of a cold Atlantic surf. I see him. Not the jogger by the lake, but the man who held me while the world burned. He kisses me, and it’s like swallowing a star—a heat so intense it should turn me to ash.

At night, next to August, the silence is a scream. August breathes with a slow, rhythmic peace. I lie awake, counting the miles between my heart and the one currently beating in a house across town. I trace the air with my fingers, imagining the curve of his shoulder, the heat of his chest. I whisper his true name into my pillow, a secret prayer that I hope catches the wind and finds him in his sleep. I want to haunt his dreams until he wakes up gasping, tasting my name like salt and longing. But I keep the doors of his mind closed. I love him enough to let him forget me, even if the forgetting is what kills me every single day.

But then the sun comes up.

The morning is always the hardest. The light through the blinds is aggressive and honest. August is already in the kitchen, the rhythmic thump-thump of the knife against the cutting board as he prepares fruit for breakfast. It’s a domestic symphony that should be comforting. Instead, it sounds like a countdown.

"Rough night?" he asks, stepping behind me to massage my shoulders. His thumbs find the knots in my neck with clinical precision. He is so patient. He is so good. And I hate him for it.

I hate that he is the consolation prize for a game I never wanted to play. I hate that I have to perform the role of a grateful wife while my husband—my real husband—is three miles away, probably making breakfast for a woman who doesn't know the secret language of his freckles.

I cannot leave. I cannot take the short way out. The angels were very clear about the void. It isn't just a place of darkness; it's a place of absolute disconnection. If I were to end this life early, the tether would snap. I would wander through eternity without a map, and he would be left to cycle through lives alone, never knowing why he felt that phantom ache in his chest every time he saw a blue scarf or a glimmering lake.

So, I eat the fruit August cut for me. I smile when he kisses my forehead before he leaves for his firm. I put on my coat and prepare for another Tuesday. I am a prisoner of hope. I am a vault for a history that only one person possesses.

As I walk back toward Lake Michigan, I watch the water. It’s the only thing that stays the same across the centuries. The water remembers. It has seen us drown together, and it has seen us baptize our children. I sit on my bench. I wait for the sound of sneakers on pavement. I wait for the "fumes" to choke me. Even the suffocation of his presence is better than the easy breathing of a life without him.