Stephanie says, “Time is less like a line and more like a coil.” Her eyebrows knit as her finger draws a tight spiral through the air. She stops, carefully holding a point on an imaginary slinky with small, paint-chipped fingernails. It's the late nineties, and we’re sitting cross-legged on a dusty rug in southern New Hampshire, becoming inseparable. “This summer is closer to last summer, to all summers, than any winter.” Less than being true, this feels true.

When spring bursts forth like a firework, warm air, buds popping, royal blue sky—I’m brought twenty years back to the mountains—to the sun on chartreuse baby-leaves, glowing like newborn hope. I’m brought nineteen years back to the stream I biked to, ice melting enough to expose a place to skinny dip, wanting to take hold of summer too soon, shivering in a sliver of sunlight on sand, skin turning steel blue—wondering if I shouldn’t have come alone. I’m brought eighteen years back to the year we needed to swim, needed the snowmelt shocking our cores—but we drove for miles without seeing an iceless stream—my friends and I rolled naked down snow-covered hills, inhaling the smell of mud burning holes through the snow, exhaling yelps and guffaws.

When I’m lonely, I feel closer to other times of loneliness than any happy minute. When I miss Stephanie, I think of all the hours we spent on the phone one semester, melting the gap that ran overseas, racking up my landline bill with dollars that could stretch from my dorm in New Hampshire to her flat in London. Stephanie would have said it's because we’re Geminis. We need to talk. We barrel through the ether, accumulating books and spices and wounds and stitches.

Now we have children that can play on the beach together, while we talk on towels. Mostly, though, we still rely on calls from one coast to another so we can trip back and forth through more than twenty years of friendship, slipping in and out of the coil, like my finger once played with a phone cord.

It’s not time travel when I enter the coil, maybe time bends, maybe my mind does the bending. Maybe it’s like the olfactory bulb sitting next to where we process emotion and memory, it’s not my fault, it’s anatomy. Steam rises from my Egyptian licorice tea, and I can almost feel Stephanie’s butter-soft gaze slide past my arm, her ideas curling in the air.

Melissa Saggerer doesn't swim as much as she used to. She has work in Rejection Letters, HAD, JMWW, Milk Candy Review, and elsewhere. Her prose has been nominated for Best Microfiction and a Pushcart. Her pieces are collected at melissasaggerer.wordpress.com and you can follow her on twitter @MelissaSaggerer.