The Moment Your Hand Passed Through Mine

Your fingers slipped through my palm like light through glass and I smiled at you before the grief reached my chest because my body understood the loss faster than my mind allowed it.

The transit platform shimmered with heat and static as the city prepared for another temporal adjustment. Above us the sky glowed a bruised violet where the lattice satellites rewrote the hour for everyone still bound to linear time. Wind carried the metallic scent of ionized air and the low hum of generators vibrated through the soles of my boots. You stood so close that your sleeve brushed mine though I already knew the contact was an illusion delayed by fractions of a second I could never recover.

You said my name softly as if volume alone might keep us aligned. Your eyes searched my face not for reassurance but for permission. Around us people moved in slow overlapping blurs some arriving some leaving some both at once. The platform clock stuttered then reset. I tried to hold your hand again and felt nothing. That was when you stepped back and the space you left behind felt colder than vacuum.

Chronal drift zones had existed for decades but the city of Virex was the first to live inside one by choice. Time here was adjustable elastic leased in segments and sold to industries that needed more tomorrow than today could offer. I came as an engineer to maintain the anchors that kept citizens synchronized enough to function. You came as a linguist to help people talk to versions of themselves they no longer recognized.

We met in an archive room buried beneath the city where old timelines were stored like bones. The lights were dim to preserve the data and dust hung in the air unmoving trapped between seconds. You were sitting on the floor surrounded by holo texts muttering to yourself. When I asked if you were lost you looked up and said only in the grammatical sense. I sat down beside you without thinking and the moment stretched comfortably around us.

Our work intersected in small ways at first. I calibrated anchors you studied transcripts of cross time conversations. You taught me that language bent under temporal stress pronouns dissolving tenses collapsing into emotion. I taught you how to feel the vibration of a stable anchor through your feet. We spent long evenings walking the upper bridges where the city lights flickered out of sync creating patterns that felt almost intentional. You liked to pause and count the flickers. I liked watching you count.

There was a phrase you used often when things felt uncertain. Still here. You said it quietly like a promise and sometimes like a question. I began to say it too though it meant something different in my mouth. It became our way of checking alignment not of time but of intention.

The drift began subtly. I would arrive at a meeting to find you already there mid sentence responding to something I had not yet said. You would text me about a conversation we had not yet had. The first time it happened we laughed nervously and blamed system lag. The second time you went very quiet. By the third we both knew.

Emotional proximity was a known catalyst. The closer two people became the more likely their personal timelines would misalign creating interference patterns. The city guidelines recommended distance. We ignored them with care and a growing sense of inevitability. When we touched it felt warm real grounding. When we pulled away the world slipped.

One night on the bridge during a scheduled rollback the city froze around us. Lights held steady. Wind paused mid gust. Only we could move caught between ticks. You looked at me with something like wonder and fear intertwined. You said still here and this time it was a question. I answered by taking your face in my hands and kissing you gently aware even then that the moment was borrowed.

After that the drift accelerated. Our conversations fractured into overlapping versions. Sometimes you remembered arguments I did not. Sometimes I mourned futures you insisted had already passed. The anchors struggled to compensate. I filed reports with shaking hands careful not to name the cause. You began to record messages to yourself to keep track of who you were becoming.

The city council intervened at last. One of us would need to be phased forward isolated into a stabilized future segment to prevent wider desynchronization. The other would remain anchored to the present maintaining city coherence. Separation was not a punishment they said but a necessity. They asked who would go.

We did not answer immediately. We walked instead through the lower markets where time ran slower and fruit never quite ripened. You bought two cups of bitter tea and handed me one though I had already finished mine in another version of the evening. We sat on the steps and watched vendors blink in and out of phase. You said still here again softer now. I said it back knowing it would soon be untrue.

You volunteered first. You said your work was about translation about living between meanings. You said I was needed here to keep the anchors steady. I wanted to argue but every future I glimpsed ended the same way with the city unraveling if I left. I nodded and the decision locked into place around us like cooling metal.

The transition platform was quiet at dawn. The city had rolled back an hour for stability giving us borrowed light. When you stepped into the field your outline blurred edges softening as if the world were already letting you go. I reached for you and felt resistance then nothing. That was when your hand passed through mine and the truth finally landed.

You did not cry. You smiled that small steady smile and said still here as if you were reassuring me not yourself. Then the field brightened and you were gone pulled forward into a future I could no longer access.

Life settled into a careful rhythm after that. The city stabilized. Reports praised the success of the intervention. I returned to the bridges alone counting flickers without meaning to. Sometimes I caught fragments of you in reflections or heard your voice delayed in crowded corridors. Once a message arrived on my console timestamped decades ahead containing only two words. Still here.

I visit the platform often though there is nothing to see. I stand where you stood and hold my hand out feeling the hum of the anchors beneath my feet. The air is empty but charged with memory. I have learned to live with love that exists out of phase neither lost nor present just elsewhere.

When the sky glows violet and the clocks stutter I whisper your name into the pause. Somewhere ahead of me you are doing the same. The moment your hand passed through mine never really ended. It simply stretched into the rest of my life teaching me how to stay when holding on is no longer possible.