Present

There are moments that come to stay.

Sweat drips from his forehead as he brings his chest closer to the bar. His veins bulge with the last effort.

As he lowers himself, his hands lose their grip and slip. He falls backward onto the floor, in pain and panting, but not from the fall, and certainly not from the exercises.

Even if only in memory, they etch themselves like marks in metal, and when they invade the mind, they leave traces of dead neurons behind.

With each exhalation, he releases an agonizing breath into the air, which mixes with the relentless rain falling outside, like a distorted memory of Neptune's climate and his cosmic journey.

Christopher arrives at the library as if he were going to meet her at the usual time.

He knows he shouldn't be there, that he shouldn't have walked those streets, that he shouldn't have returned. He can't help it; he has to do this. Stopping means turning his back on everything he's experienced, it means suicide, and there's no way out. Being there helps to confirm that if anything of him had touched her vanished heart, then she would return, as she had confessed.

With the notebook in hand, he enters the familiar hallway and waits, watching as the sunlight dies in the window. It's just another day disappearing into time.

He looks at the entrance door and waits for a chance, a coincidence, or better yet, a decision. He knows he shouldn't do this, he shouldn't be there, but he has no other place that claims his presence with such warmth.

How many times had he gone to wait for her? Is he becoming a measure of time?

He can't give up; there's a very small chance, but that's enough, it's all he needs.

Thinking this way had kept him steady, but suddenly he starts to feel he needs an alternate measure.

He checks the time. The place is about to close. He must leave, he must go, but he can't help but keep waiting, can't help but hold onto the hope of an encounter. He knows he shouldn't be there, but he stays a little longer, trapped between light and darkness, clarity and mystery, past and present.

He returns to his apartment and opens a sport bag. He packs clothes and canned food, driven by the urgency of not losing the memories of the Mermaid and determined to find another portal to Neptune to find her again. He puts on a black jacket and stores his documents, cell phone, and keys in his pockets, grabbing them from the table. The notebook of his story he places in the inner chest pocket, like a space compass that will guide him.

It's already night. Christopher is walking along the roadside, amidst car lights, with nothing but trees on either side. He carries the bag slung over his shoulder and his hood up. He eats a can of tuna while signaling for rides. The rain begins to fall, and the sound of the drops hitting the pavement revives memories of when he used to walk accompanied.

An hour later, Christopher adjusts his jacket and settles in the corner of a pickup truck. There are other travelers with him, enduring the same cold. The fog surrounding him brings back the days when something greater was part of him.

He takes a pen and his story notebook from his pocket. He remembers what he had last written. It wasn't a good idea; suddenly he finds himself analyzing the past, and that disorientation highlights his feeling of being lost, but he finds the logic in it.

No matter how much you review the facts, one thing always stands out: everything happens for a reason, regardless of chance.

He looks for the last written page, and in doing so, a piece of paper falls from between the pages. As he picks it up, he finds the five lines written by her in coded letters. A single glance is enough for the content to seize him.

There's always a why, always. Buried beneath the facts like pieces that solving a homicide.

His eyes moisten, and a solitary tear slides down his cheek as the truck moves along the road, taking him further away from everything he once knew.

Limbo

A drop of blood slides down a suspended mirror, the one that had made a line on his leg.

The walls torment him with loud cries of heretical intent. They spit out deathly phrases, alleging that the Universe is nothing more than a blind and colossal mechanism that spins incessantly.

The pieces of the mirror suddenly vibrate and begin to fall slowly, numbed, in slow motion, as gravity awakens from a deep slumber.

Christopher realizes that the pieces are not in random positions, not chaotic, but organized in a single spiral that comes from the infinite sky.

He moves, struggling to avoid the nearest edges.

The fragments begin to spin on their own axis, and Christopher, suspended in the air, is surrounded by the gleaming flashes of his own reflections.

The walls taunt him, claiming he's nothing more than a fragile edge. They tempt him to try to evade the activity of the spinning mechanism.

A blade cuts his arm. Christopher lets out a muffled scream. Blood emerges like a sweet tear. Another one cuts his chest. Another, his rib...

Christopher fixes his gaze on the infinite. And he defies it.

Past

It was a day like any other, and Christopher was on his way to work amidst a crowd of people waiting at the corner. The pedestrian traffic light turned green, and the stream of people dressed for work crossed the street. The sun was shining timidly, and its light reflected through the windows of the modern buildings lining the street. Traffic flowed smoothly with only a faint sound of car horns, and the streets were still damp from the early morning rain.

While waiting at the next corner for the pedestrian light to change to green, something in the building across the street caught Christopher's attention. In one of the windows on the second floor, he spotted the woman in the crimson beanie once again. She was taking selfies with her cellphone. He couldn't take his eyes off her. How was it possible that he had never seen her there before? Had she been living in that building all this time?

As he watched, the traffic light changed to green, but Christopher stayed behind to keep watching her. At that moment, she turned and looked directly at him. Christopher felt a chill run down his spine. How had she known he was there? Was it another coincidence, or was it something more?

She quickly pretended to be doing nothing, but her cheeks flushed pink.

How had she managed to spot him in the crowd? Who or what was bringing them together? Was it all just an absurd and mundane coincidence?

As Christopher pondered this, a car splashed through a puddle at the corner, and water sprayed onto his coat. She stifled a laugh and hid behind the curtain to avoid drawing attention. He shook off the water and looked back at the window, but this time, it was closed. All of this seemed like a humorous coincidence, a senseless cliché that rarely happens.

Christopher crossed over to his workplace, located right next to the building where she lived. Questions kept swirling in his mind. How could she be there? Was all of this just a strange twist of fate?