The Subjunctive Tense

Sabine discovered that love operated on Pacific Standard Time while loneliness ran on Eastern European Time—three hours behind and ten ahead, depending on how you counted.

She'd memorized the conversion without trying: 7 AM in Seattle meant 5 PM in Prague, her morning coffee aligning with Tom's evening beer. Their days overlapped like a badly shuffled deck of cards, each pulling different suits at different times. She kept a widget on her phone's home screen showing Prague time, right next to Seattle's, two clocks that never quite agreed on when "now" was.

"Show me your view," she said during their Tuesday call, which was his Wednesday. He turned his phone toward the window. Prague Castle glowed amber in the setting sun, tourists probably still wandering the Charles Bridge below, while behind Sabine, Seattle's skyline was still brushing sleep from its eyes, the Sound reflecting nothing but gray morning mist.

They'd met the old-fashioned way—in person, at a conference in Vienna where neither of them lived. Three days of accidentally choosing the same sessions, the same coffee breaks, the same nervous laughter when they reached for the last apfelstrudel at the hotel's breakfast buffet. He'd insisted she take it. She'd insisted they share. The compromise had required sitting very close together on a bench overlooking the Danube, her conference badge tangling with his as they leaned over the same pastry with plastic forks, arguing about the proper ratio of apple to pastry.

"You're doing it wrong," she'd said, laughing as he dissected it like a geological sample.

"I'm a methodical eater," he'd protested, his Czech accent making 'methodical' sound like music.

Now, four months later, they existed primarily as pixels on screens, their relationship compressed into video calls that never quite captured how his eyes crinkled when he really laughed, not the polite laugh but the one that escaped despite himself. She'd screenshot him once during a call, trying to preserve something real, but the image came out blurry, his face caught between expressions, neither here nor there.

"I got the promotion," Sabine said, watching his face carefully for the micro-delay that wasn't just digital lag.

"That's wonderful," he said, and she could see him doing the math—a promotion meant roots, meant Seattle becoming more permanent while Prague remained stubbornly 5,000 miles away. His coffee mug (evening coffee, he'd developed the habit just to share something with her morning routine) steamed between his hands.

They'd become experts at reading between lines of code and time zones. When he said "I miss you," he meant he'd walked past a café that served American-style pancakes and thought of her terrible cooking. When she said "How was your day?" she meant she'd calculated that asking about his tomorrow would hurt less than asking about his today, which she'd missed entirely while sleeping.

"My sister thinks I'm crazy," Sabine admitted during a Sunday morning call, pulling her knees to her chest in her Queen Anne apartment. "She says I'm dating a concept, not a person."

"Maybe she's right," Tom said, his smile sad and knowing. "But concepts can be very attractive. The concept of you gets me through faculty meetings. My colleagues think I'm taking notes, but I'm writing to you."

She'd kept every email, every text, every voice message he'd sent when her phone was off. They lived in her phone like evidence of something that might not otherwise be believed. Three gigabytes of proof that someone across the world thought of her at 3 PM Prague time, which was when he usually got restless and needed to hear her voice, even recorded.

They'd tried to establish rituals. Watching the same movie at different times but texting reactions. Reading the same book, chapter by chapter, arguing about characters as if they were mutual friends. He'd mail her Czech tea—loose leaf that smelled like his apartment, he said; she'd send Seattle coffee—beans from the place where she wrote on Sunday mornings. The packages arrived like dispatches from another world, one where they grocery shopped together and argued about which brand to buy, where mundane choices were made together instead of reported after the fact.

The worst part wasn't the distance—it was the math. Every conversation began with calculation. If I stay up until 2 AM, we can talk during your lunch. If you wake up at 5, we can have breakfast together, sort of. They lived in the subjunctive tense: if, would, could, might.

"I looked at flights," Sabine said one evening (his morning). The silence stretched across continents. She could hear birds through his window—Prague sparrows greeting the day she wouldn't see for hours.

"So did I," he admitted. "But then what? You visit for a week? I come for ten days? We pretend that's enough?"

She wanted to say it would be enough, that any time would be enough, but they'd built their strange love on honesty transmitted through fiber optic cables. The truth was that visits were like trying to drink the ocean through a straw—the thirst just got worse. She'd learned this from a disastrous long weekend in Reykjavik, meant to be neutral ground, which had ended with both of them crying in the airport, the fluorescent lights making everything worse.

"Sometimes I forget what you smell like," she said, then immediately regretted it. But he laughed, the real laugh.

"Books and coffee and that terrible cologne my mother sends every Christmas. Very professorial. You're not missing much."

"I miss everything," she said, and meant it. "I miss the way you organize your desk. I miss watching you think."

"You've never seen my desk," he pointed out gently.

"I've imagined it. Obsessively organized but with one drawer that's complete chaos, right?"

His silence was answer enough. They knew each other in theory, in projection, in wish.

They hung on through winter, their calls becoming shorter but more frequent, little check-ins like touching base in a game of tag played across time zones. Good morning. Good night. Did you eat? How's the weather? The mundane became precious when it was all they had. Sabine found herself photographing her lunch to send him, as if proving she was taking care of herself, as if he could somehow reach through the phone and add salt.

Spring arrived differently for each of them. Her March rain, his April sun. Sabine watched cherry blossoms bloom in Seattle while Tom described the Easter markets in Prague, the painted eggs and gingerbread hearts that seemed to mock their separation. They sent photos constantly, trying to stitch their separate worlds together into something that made sense.

"This is insane," Sabine said during a particularly bad connection, his face freezing mid-word, pixels scattered like a broken promise.

"I know," he said when the connection cleared. "But so is the alternative."

The alternative was letting go, and neither of them, it seemed, had figured out how to do that across such a distance. Breaking up required proximity, or at least the same time zone. How could you end something that existed primarily in the space between voices, in the pause before video caught up with audio?

Sabine's laptop screen had become her window into love—backlit, rechargeable, and always slightly out of sync. But when Tom smiled, even through the pixelated distance, even across the time between them, something in her chest recognized its home.

"I'll call you tomorrow," he said, which meant today for her, or yesterday, or whenever they could make the math work.

"I'll be here," she said, which was both the problem and the promise.

After they hung up, Sabine sat in the growing darkness while somewhere in Prague, Tom faced his brightening day. Always saying goodbye in a different light, always beginning where the other was ending. But still, they held on.