Again and Again

Thank you for choosing Everlasting! We should be arriving on June 8th, 2054 shortly.

Simone let out a sigh of relief as she realized she had the whole row to herself. No one to notice as she whispered out loud and gripped the K pendant hanging from her neck.

There weren’t many others on the plane, but Simone supposed it wasn’t a very popular day. She examined the heads around her in the cabin. A blond woman in a leather jacket sat in the first row. There was a little boy sleeping in an aisle seat near the front. An older woman sat by herself towards the back of the plane and was singing loudly, not caring for the other passengers around her.

The final person on the plane was a man sitting a couple rows behind her. He looked to be just a few years younger than Simone herself. As if he felt her eyes on him, his gaze snapped up and met hers. He smiled.

Simone faced forward and closed her eyes. She needed rest for the day ahead of her.

Thank you for choosing Everlasting! We should be arriving on June 8th, 2054 shortly.

“Is this seat taken?”

Simone looked up. It was the man who had smiled at her on her first flight.

She pointedly looked around the cabin. It was empty. It had been just the two of them since her third trip; the sleeping little boy had been the only other passenger on her second.

He laughed. “Sorry, it’s just that we’ve both been on these flights a few different times – it feels rude not to introduce myself. I’m Andrew.”

He stuck out his hand. Simone stared at it, then shook it with her own. His grip was firm.

“Simone.”

“Nice to meet you, Simone.” He took the seat next to her and they sat in silence together.

Thank you for choosing Everlasting! We should be arriving on June 8th, 2054 shortly.

Andrew sat next to her. It had become a bit of a ritual – them sitting next to each other and not speaking. As impossible as it would’ve been to verbalize, Simone had to admit she felt the tiniest bit of comfort sitting with a stranger about to relive the same day as she.

This time was different.

He broke the silence. “I’m curious about why you keep coming back here. Everyone else takes one flight, maybe two, but you’ve hit double digits.”

She gave him a puzzled look.

“I know it’s stupid to ask,” he hurried, “since I keep coming back too. But something makes me think our situations aren’t quite the same. So… what brings you back to June 8th, 2054?”

As he spoke, all the feelings Simone was usually able to bury while in this purgatory state steadily rose within her, threatening to drown her in a tidal wave.

“Come on, sleepy, time to get up.”

“Five more minutes,” Kiara groaned, pulling her purple blanket up over her head.

Simone swallowed and forced the memory out of her mind. He didn’t need to know the details. He didn’t need to know any of it.

But who did she have to tell it to? Family members handled her delicately. Coworkers and neighbors looked at her with pity or, at times, with judgement. But Andrew? Andrew was nobody. Andrew was a stranger, one whom she’d likely never meet out in the real world. Simone had to admit, she hadn’t felt this… ordinary in a long time.

“My daughter passed away on June 8th, 2054.” She fixed her gaze on the back of the seat ahead of her. “She…”

Simone’s throat tightened. She thought she could get through the story, but it had been awhile since she’d said those words aloud.

It was quiet for a while before Andrew asked, “What was her name?”

“Kiara.”

“How old was she?”

“Seven.” It came out as a whisper.

Time was a strange thing. The day she heard about a company experimenting with sending people’s consciousnesses back into the past, she signed up for the waiting list. Once she was selected, they had given her a million waivers – warnings about the butterfly effect, dying in the novel process, the possibility of being trapped in the past or somewhere she could never return from. She had signed them all, paid her deposit, and waited months to be called for her flight.

“June 8th was the worst day of my life. There were so many tiny choices that morning alone, so many unimportant decisions pulled together by random chance, all leading towards that moment. If I could get just one of them to go differently…” Simone took a deep breath and closed her eyes. “I don’t care how it might impact the future. I don’t care if there is no future at all for me after this. I’ll redo this day again and again until I can save her.”

Thank you for choosing Everlasting! We should be arriving on June 8th, 2054 shortly.

“Nice to see you again, Andrew,” Simone said, though she didn’t truly mean it. One more flight meant one more failure. He waved and beckoned her over.

“I’ve been thinking,” he started. “Thinking about how things may be different for you and me. Out there, that is.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“What do you see?”

“Right now?” Simone’s eyes looked away, then back at him. “A plane cabin?”

“I mean when you look at me. Tell me what I look like.”

Simone blinked and gave him a once over. “I don’t know, I guess I see a man with curly brown hair and light eyes. Mid-to-late twenties maybe? You’re wearing a faded gray t-shirt and basketball shorts. I’m sorry, I feel sort of silly describing a person to their face.”

He chuckled and looked away. “That’s alright. I guess that’s what I must look like here because that’s what I looked like on this day we keep going back to. But out there, in my time…”

His voice trailed off as his eyes fixed on his legs. “Let’s just say I’m not as young as I used to be. Or as mobile.”

He sighed and stretched his legs out in front of him.

“I wasn’t supposed to be in the neighborhood,” he began. “I should’ve been at the office but my brother had convinced me to take the day off to help him move. Asked me to get to his place by nine.” He chuckled. “I let myself in and found him passed out, hungover on the couch, empty moving boxes all around him. So I left. I figured I’d get a bite to eat and head back in a few hours. But when I left his building, there was a woman jogging by, staring at her fitness watch. She ran right into me.”

A smile slowly spread on his face. “And I just knew.”

He told Simone everything. Every little detail from the slight accent he detected on her vowels but couldn’t place, to the rich bourbon color of her hair in the late spring light. They talked over omelettes at a diner two blocks over, then walked around downtown for hours, then went into a bookstore and bought books for each other. He got her an old fantasy novel; she got him a beginner’s cookbook.

“We didn’t want the day to end,” he said, “so we met up later at one of her favorite spots to go dancing.” He smiled, a brilliant smile that pierced Simone’s heart. “And we danced and danced.”

He paused. Simone wondered if he regretted sharing so much.

“June 8th, 2054 was the happiest day of my life,” he finally continued. “Because I met her. Out there in the real world, in the present for me, a lot of time has passed. I don’t have much of it left. Luz and I never had kids–” He cleared his throat and shook his head. “Anyway, you and I both know Everlasting isn’t cheap.”

Simone didn’t need the reminder. She’d sold her house to pay for more trips with the company. Gone was the one place she’d ever truly felt at home, along with all the memory it preserved of Kiara. When it was finally time to go, Simone had sobbed into the purple blanket Kiara had long ago demanded for her first big girl bed, using it to wipe her tears before she neatly folded it into a storage container.

She tucked away the memory. “So,” Simone asked, “why do you keep coming back?”

He smiled. “I can’t take the money with me. So I’ll live this day as many times as I can, just to see my wife for the first time again and again.”

Thank you for choosing Everlasting! We should be arriving on June 8th, 2054 shortly.

“You never seem surprised to see me.” Simone settled down next to Andrew. “Maybe this is the time I get it right and you’ll be taking these flights by yourself from now on.”

This time Andrew said nothing. He had a pensive look on his face. Simone muttered her apologies.

“Can I ask you something?” Andrew finally spoke. “Please don’t take any offense.”

“Go for it.”

“What was June 7th, 2054 like?”

Simone paused, thinking he had misspoken. “I already told you what this day was like for me.”

Andrew shook his head. “No, you told me about June 8th. I want to hear about June 7th.”

A beat passed, then two. Simone struggled to picture it as vividly as she did the day that came after. Fragments flitted into her mind as Simone thought back to that penultimate day.

Simone holds her daughter’s hand as they walk to Kiara’s Sunday morning ballet class.

Kiara puts together a puzzle with cartoonish dinosaurs on it as Simone microwaves leftovers for lunch.

Simone dozes off on the couch and wakes up to her daughter filming her and giggling.

It was mundane. It was a lifetime of unimportant moments crammed into the twenty-four hour frame of a day that held no significance, and would never be revisited. It was the last full day of her daughter’s life, and it was gone.

“You don’t need to tell me,” Andrew said, his voice low and cautious. “It’s just that… well, I’m not really supposed to say it.”

“You can say it,” Simone said softly. She had already put the pieces together after so many trips.

He shook his head, seemingly trying to find the right words. “I don’t know the science behind all of this.” He waved his hand, gesturing at their surroundings. “I don’t know how it works. But in my time, we know that it’s impossible to alter the past. It can be lived and relived, again and again. But the choices we made the first go-around… those are it. Those are set.”

Simone looked towards the window and lifted the shade. The same pillowy clouds hung beneath them as always, the setting sun tinging the edges of them blood orange. She tapped her nails against the window and felt the cool glass beneath her fingertips.

“These trips…”

“They take us back to memories, not to moments in the past. I’m so sorry Simone. There’s nothing you can do.”

Deep down, she had known. Each time she had gone back felt more like watching a movie she just so happened to be starring in, rather than actively living it. She poured the same cereal for breakfast, took the same multivitamin, knocked on Kiara’s bedroom door to wake her up the same way.

“I could…” Simone’s voice broke as tears welled up in her eyes. “I could give her five more minutes,” she whispered.

“Or you could change course,” Andrew responded gently. He took her hand and lightly squeezed, and even though Simone knew the sensation wasn’t real, she felt it. “Go back to June 7th. Or to her first birthday party, or her kindergarten graduation. Or pick the most uneventful day you can think of and live it again. You don’t have to keep doing this to yourself, Simone.”

The clouds floated by. What would letting go look like?

Simone pulled her hand from Andrew’s and swiped her fingers under her eyes. She knew she would never see him again, and so she turned to him one last time.

“Thank you. I mean it.”

A chime sounded through the plane, indicating they were nearing their destination. Simone buckled her seatbelt, closed her eyes, and prepared for landing.