Mayluna

by Kelley McNeil

He often said that time travel was more accessible to us than we realize, and that music is one of the ways we do it. He’s right, I think. After all, few things have the ability to transport us so completely and powerfully as the sound of the perfect, meaningful song. The music of our lifetime is woven into the fabric of our existence, our own personal soundtrack behind our stories. Maybe it takes us to a memory, an echo of something that once was, or maybe to a place where we can live out an imagined dream.

One child on each side, their faces are turned upward to gaze at mine with the adoration and love that only a child can offer a mother.

But that’s the funny thing about the universe—it has such wondrous possibilities for us, far beyond anything we could imagine for our own lives. Even yours, Lainey. Even when it seems like life is going to be a series of predictable days. All we have to do is open our eyes and believe in them: the possibilities.

I should have known then—that we were completing each other in all the most dangerous ways. Trying to heal old, deep wounds in a shared sadness of the past together with the hopeful belief that we would somehow fix each other. Two puzzle pieces, matched together from lifetimes before.

He felt familiar and new and like someone I’d known in every lifetime, if I believed in such things. When he was gone, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. And when he was with me, I felt completely alive. It was too much. I know that now, of course. It’s dangerous to love like that. To spend years wishing more than anything that you could go back to a night, standing barefoot with a guitar calling you like a siren song.

“There’s beauty in the ocean, but there’s magic in the forest.”

it’s possible that tomorrow could be sad, then perhaps it’s equally possible that it could be joyful. Equally possible that something wonderful could happen. Something that surprises me. Something that reminds me that the universe hasn’t forgotten about me. Something that shows me that every day, there is . . . at least . . . the possibility that something miraculous, however large or small, will come from this single moment in time. Probability can be a little too hard to believe in sometimes. But possibility is enough.

We were puppets on the strings of a dream, our schedules and plans and every moment dictated by the machine to which we had sold our lives.

Along my journey, I had discovered a powerful truth—the one we love the most in life may not be the one we love the best.