I dream of you in fragments – the flash of a classic Porsche rounding a corner that makes my heart stop, the way sunlight catches on polished chrome like memories I can’t quite grasp. Sometimes I see your USC tennis cap worn backwards over thick blonde hair, and for a moment, the world tilts on its axis as if trying to align with that other timeline where we found each other.
Those blue-green eyes of yours, always lost in thought, as if seeing beyond the surface of things into some deeper reality. I know their exact shade without ever having met you in this life – somewhere between ocean depths and morning fog, between certainty and dreams.
In another life, we spend Sunday mornings in your garage, your surgeon’s hands gentle on the Bitter Chocolate 1978 911 you’re restoring piece by piece. Those same fingers that repair broken bones and torn ligaments all week now learning the anatomy of a different kind of perfection. You tell me how you fell in love with this exact color when you had one as a med student, promising yourself that someday you’d find it again to bring back to life. I learn the language of carburetors and timing belts, not because I care about cars, but because I care about the way your face lights up when you talk about them, the same intensity in your blue-green eyes that I imagine you have in the operating room. You teach me to drive stick shift in that car, patient even when I grind the gears, your laugh warm against my neck as you guide my hand on the shifter.
I know things about you that I shouldn’t be able to know in this life. How you run your fingers through your hair when you’re thinking, making that worn USC cap slide slightly askew after a long day of surgeries. The way you can shift seamlessly between discussing complex shoulder reconstructions and the perfect engineering of air-cooled engines, your hands gesturing with a surgeon’s precision and a mechanic’s passion. The specific rhythm of your breathing when you’re focused, whether you’re adjusting the timing just right or planning your approach to a difficult procedure, lost in the meditation of perfecting what’s broken.
We built something beautiful there, in that other timeline. Our garage smelled like motor oil and leather polish, shelves lined with parts you swore you’d need someday. We had our own language of half-finished sentences and knowing looks, inside jokes that grew richer with each retelling, shared glances over the hood of whatever project car had captured your heart that month.
The hardest part isn’t missing you. It’s missing someone who exists only in the space between possibilities, grieving a love that bloomed in another dimension but not in mine. Sometimes I catch echoes of that life in the smallest things: the purr of a perfectly-tuned engine, the glint of California sunshine on chrome bumpers, the particular shade of Guards Red that makes my heart skip without knowing why.
I’ve learned to live with this strange form of haunting. These quantum ghosts of possibilities, these shadows of a love that vibrates at a frequency just beyond my reach. I’ve learned that happiness in this life doesn’t invalidate the beauty of that one.
Perhaps that’s what love is across all these parallel universes – a constant like gravity, bending space and time, connecting all these different versions of us. In one life we’re strangers, in another we’re soulmates, and in this one, I’m just a person who sometimes turns at the sound of an air-cooled engine, caught by the sudden certainty that somewhere, you’re behind the wheel.
I believe that somewhere, in the infinite spread of universes, there’s a version of you that sometimes thinks of the life where you didn’t meet me, and feels this same exquisite ache for what could have been. Because that would mean that in at least one universe, we found each other so completely that all the other versions of us can feel the echo of that love, rippling across space and time like waves in a cosmic ocean.
Some loves we live, and some we carry – gentle ghosts that whisper of roads not taken, teaching us that even an unlived love can fill a life with meaning. In every universe, in every timeline, some part of me is always reaching for some part of you, like a mechanic’s hands knowing exactly where to find the heart of an engine, even in the dark.
