Traveling through time with you

"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving." That's what you told me on the eve of our great departure.

"Death is not a fixture, and we may never arrive." That's what you said as the sun fell, heavy and slick, into the water basin. Your hands were wet from the tears I hadn't yet cried. I closed my eyes and felt the cold rim of concrete beneath my toes. I felt your toes curling against the white edge. Your toes were ticklish, and I giggled. A sharp breeze rushed against my face. When I opened my eyes, I saw you standing across from me; your hands were cupped softly, my tears held warmly inside.

"1-2-3," you counted, lowering your chin toward your intelligent palms. Smiling up at me, you blew my tears out of your hands; they drifted like ash from your skin to mine. As the dust swirled around my body, I saw you leap into the cold water filling the sink; a sink in a home where one day we would meet. I unbuttoned the red dress that I had worn in the life before. It fell from my body and cascaded down from a 10-story building onto the checkered floor of a small bathroom where I would one day deliver a dead baby. The small shape of the baby unzipped its surrounding placenta. Blood spilled out onto the tiles as my dress engulfed the earth below. His little hand grabbed mine.

"Let's fall for 4 months," the baby said.

"Goodbye," I said.

"You'll never get to see my hands," he said.

"You'll become like the flatlands. You'll be buried between two thick tree roots. You'll grow into a tuft of grass, and then into a flower field. Your death will awaken an ache within me. Your nutrients will spark an acre of green," I said as we fell like snails into the water.

When I awoke, the sensation of his small fingers interlaced with mine was now the heavy waves engulfing a sailboat above me. What fragmented thoughts an ocean storm brings; though, through the breaks of the waves, I could hear a familiar voice singing an old- time tune.

"Sha-do-wop sha-do-wop sha-di-di-di-dooo," you crooned.

Sha-do-da-dooo-daaa-daayy," I sang, as the water gargled into my throat. The sea rushed into my eyes as I swam against the current to keep up with your boat. An urge of desire kept me at your side, for in your voice I heard a sway. This was the day I realized the earth had gone away. The waves were tireless and long; they turned your tune into a winter song. The ocean began to freeze, so I made a still space in the deep below, between the great divide and purgatorial undertow, and as your body froze into the bow, I remembered a time from long ago.

A memory of walking through an underground tunnel that led to an open closet door. The ceiling of the closet was cement and had a cylindrical opening covered in root growth. It smelled like soil and trees after a heavy rain. I floated through the opening into humid and chilly air. Expansive, gloom-bright, and all-consuming. Near the opening was a girl in a red raincoat sitting in an empty tub; she was laughing, and her laugh sounded like bells in an empty room. She was sending me toward a large forest of dead trees. I wasn't scared of the forest because the wet air was rushing past my ears, and it sounded like the quiet that surrounds you when you're underwater, totally detached and serene. I knew soon I'd be floating back in that cold water in the basin with you.