Stonecrop Magazine

You got a fast car but you’d rather have a time machine.

You’d travel back in time, to that night in late July just one week before her birthday—and you’d drive like hell to that place where she died alone on the carpet. You’d get there hours before the terrible thing that happened happened—and you’d leave together, hand-in-hand, never to return. You’d get take-out and spend the night watching Golden Girls re-runs—instead of transforming into ghosts, the both of you, somewhere that wasn’t home.

Maybe you’d go back a little further, to the Fourth of July, just a couple of weeks before the terrible thing happened. You’d give her that new bottle of perfume you’d left sitting on the windowsill of your bathroom—instead of getting angry when you heard her rifling through your cabinets for twenty-minutes. When she finally opened the door, freshly coiffed after testing out all of your beauty products, telling you how much she adored the scent she was now drenched in—you’d just hand her the bottle and say, “Happy Birthday.” She’d shriek with glee and do that stupid celebration dance only she could do—then the both of you would flop down on a big blanket outside, beneath the warm sparkle of summertime fireworks, still smelling of jasmine and white flowers.

Maybe you’d go back even further still, and you’d find that man she loved who wrote her the only love-letter she kept—the one you found afterward. You’d find him somehow and tell him how much she really cared, and this time, he wouldn’t give up on her—and neither would you.

Or maybe you’d go back even further than that, to that Spring afternoon sometime in the mid-nineties, the day your father caught you on video-tape, climbing each other like scaffolding in your grandparents’ backyard, laughing so hard you were both crying and gasping for breath—and maybe this time, you’d just stay there forever.