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.

The great philosophers and astronomers believed that music could be felt from the stars and planets, traveling through space and time, and that there was magic in the design of the cosmos, connecting us in ways we can only begin to imagine.

If only you’d known me in a different time. A different place,

And also, I liked it because no one knew me and I could reinvent myself. A new state, a new life, filled with the youthful optimism and feeling of endless possibilities laid out before me, free of my past.

Sometimes you have to do that—take the thing about you that makes you the saddest and learn to spin it into a superpower.

A chameleon, quietly perched nearby, seemingly invisible, until you looked closer and realized the miraculous and shimmering display of nature taking place.

The most pivotal days of a person’s life often start out just like any other. You wake up, brush your teeth, and go about your usual routines, having no idea that by the time you go to bed that night, your entire path will have changed.

The distance between two stars is generally so vast that it’s incredibly rare for them to collide. When they do, it’s because they share a mysterious gravitational bond that draws them toward one another, across millions of miles, in the most unlikely of ways. The two stars orbit around one another until they eventually merge to form a supernova, luminous in its grandeur, each star forever changed in composition by the other, so powerful that the supernova can be detected as far as 130 million light-years away, shuddering through space-time. It was a bit like that.

What he saw in me that night, I’ll never know.

“And sometimes you just have to trust that the universe will surprise you. Usually when you least expect it.”

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. Expect the unexpected and that’s where you’ll find the magic.

We didn’t feel like strangers, but rather like we’d found someone who had been missing for a lifetime and then suddenly there they were. Puzzle pieces sliding into place, my nervous system both stirring and calming in the most remarkable way in his unusual presence.

It was as if someone had given him a manual—a playbook of things to say. He had an uncanny way of making comments that felt like a vitamin I hadn’t realized I’d been deficient in. Nourishing.

Something about that night soothed a part of my loneliness that often ate away at the inside of me.

Simply repeating one day after the next is the enemy of a fulfilling life. It’s the reason why months go by too quickly, or years, even, and it’s like there’s almost no memory of it—an overload of routine that the brain registers as unimportant. But a new experience is something special. A bookmark. A highlighted section in the pages of your life. It’s the reason why you can remember the exact way your shoes felt on your first day of first grade or the exact light of the room when you had your first kiss but can’t remember what you did last Tuesday.

I was loved by a man who had chosen me, just as much as I’d chosen him, someone who knew how to hold my love and keep it safe.