I fell out of time again today. I recognized it the moment I came slingshotting back, stunned by my own disorientation. Gradually, I recalibrated, with my eyes closed, the weight of my head pressed into my hands. Where did I just go?

I still struggle to explain what this feels like. It’s a bit like stumbling and losing your balance: it happens so fast that sometimes you hit the ground before you can grab hold of anything to stabilize you, to return you to balance, to stasis, to the harmony between yourself and the constant pull of earth’s gravity. That breathless moment when you stand back up wondering, Did I just fall? It’s like that. Like I’m chronologically clumsy.

I hadn’t realized I’d fallen out, or how long I was gone. I’m guessing it was maybe ten or twenty minutes at most, but how do I measure the time I’ve been gone when the very thing I’ve been gone from is time?

* * *

The first witness to my falling through time was a few years ago during a conversation with my therapist. We were talking about grief, about the universality of losing someone we love, about the great interconnectedness we all share through this profound human experience. She had offered an example at random, saying, “Imagine your grief tethered to, say, a woman living in a village two hundred years ago who lost her child.” In that moment, hearing those words, my eyes closed and my head tipped forward. I suddenly saw below me a woman in a long black dress, on her knees, wailing. I recognized the golden sands and scrub brush surrounding her as those of central Sicily. She threw her head back and howled, revealing the lifeless infant in her arms.

I gasped and snapped my head back as my eyes flashed open.

“What is it?” my therapist asked. “What did you see?”

I swallowed hard, trusting that she would believe me. “My great-great-grandmother,” I said. “With her stillborn daughter.”

“You saw her?” my therapist asked gently.

“It’s like I… looked through time. My head parted this waterfall, like a curtain of water but it was time, and I saw this moment, then pulled back.”

“Maybe you did,” she said, her tone not at all surprised or doubtful.

“Maybe I did.”

* * *

One evening while I was living in the West Hills of Portland, Oregon, I took a shower before bed. While washing, I was thinking about the land my parents purchased to build a home in Massachusetts thirty-five years ago, when I was a teen. While out exploring one warm spring day with my mother and younger sister, we’d clambered over large, rough rocks and hopped across cool streams and found ourselves in a pine grove. In the center were three trees in a perfect triangle, older than the rest. Long before I learned they were a portal with the power to call me home, they were just three, like us. Three against the world. We each ran to one and wrapped our arms around them, our hands and faces sticky with sap and laughter.

I opened my eyes to discover I was falling out of the shower with the floor rushing toward me. I somehow pushed the shower curtain aside, grabbed the towel bar, protected my face from the counter, and spiraled down to my knees. I continued falling headfirst into the bathtub, and as everything swirled and spun around me, I saw the inch or so of water in the slow-draining, still-running tub. Afraid I would hit my head and drown, I desperately put out my left arm to stop myself, crash-landing with my chest on the edge of the tub and finally coming to a tumbling stop.

Stay here, stay here, stay here, I chanted, whispering to myself back to now. When I came to, when my soul came rushing back into my here-body, I was not dizzy anymore. My left arm was still braced against the bathtub floor, and my wet hair was plastered across my face and shoulders. I reached up to turn off the shower, then crawled out of the bathroom and collapsed on my back on my bedroom floor, checking my face and hands for pine sap.

* * *

I’d been crying continuously for a week by the time I boarded my flight from Oregon to Massachusetts for my beloved Erik’s funeral. The man I’d loved for twenty-two years, the man who’d loved me like no one else could, had taken his last breath here on earth.

An endless supply of tears soaked through my KN95 mask, reducing both the mask’s efficacy and my own ability to breathe. At 38,000 feet, somewhere high over the Great Plains, I abandoned the flight map on my screen for the restroom, a fresh mask in hand. I thought through the calculus I always did when walking through an airplane in flight. If the plane is going 500 mph and I’m walking 3 mph, am I walking 503 mph at 38,000 feet up in the sky? As I lifted my foot for the next step, the nose of the plane dipped suddenly, and for a brief, incredible moment, I floated. If the plane is going 500 mph and I’m walking 3 mph when I lose contact with the floor, am I flying?

When my feet returned to the floor, I gripped the seatbacks beside me to balance myself. In a compressed, elastic moment I thought of every conversation I’d had with Erik about aircraft, spaceflight, astronaut training, parabolas, weightlessness, and turbulence; I felt certain that he’d somehow switched off gravity so I could fly.

We touched down in Boston, and I wheeled my suitcase through the labyrinth of Logan Airport, just as I had months earlier when it had been my father’s turn to die. I arrived at the top of a very long double escalator heading down to the exit. Several people entered the one on the right, and the man in front of me entered the one on the left. I followed him, leaving a few stairs between us. I’ve always struggled with long escalators because their movement disrupts my sense of up and down and causes me to lose a true horizon for an artificial one. The black rubber handrail was moving slower than the stairs and this disturbed my equilibrium, so I let go. I was holding on only to my suitcase handle when the entire three-story staircase came to a shuddering, sudden halt.

From somewhere above-behind-around me, I heard a scream and the sound of items crashing and tumbling. I reached out with both hands to grip the halted handrail and catch myself before I flew away. A woman appeared just about on top of me and caught herself, and I watched helplessly as my suitcase toppled toward the man before-beside-below me. We all caught our individual and collective balance and stared at each other with expressions of shock and confusion, as the other escalator’s passengers sailed smoothly by.

Finally, my outsides match my insides, I thought. This grave, abrupt, unsettling distortion of space-time and position and safety and normalcy so perfectly reflected the cyclone of grief tearing through me. Had I caused the escalator to stop? Had I caused the plane to dip?

When it was clear that our escalator was not about to restart itself, I righted my suitcase and carried it down the two remaining stories of stairs, hoping no one blamed me for my grief rupturing space-time, for gravity itself bending under the wild-eyed intensity of my sorrow.

* * *

It happens so easily now. I sit at my desk expecting to look out my windows at my view in Oregon but find I’m at my home in Massachusetts instead. When I drift in and out of time, hovering at the threshold, I think I am somewhere else, somewhen else. Erik squeezed my hand once, and when I looked up I found him silver-haired and handsome sitting across the table from me in our backyard while our grandkids played in the grass. Grandkids that existed then but not now, there but not here; Erik at an age he never lived to become. Another day, just as I reached for his hand to hold, he— and his hand—disappeared, and I grasped at air. I’ve fallen out again. Or back in. This grief has dislodged me. How does one measure the time they’ve been gone when the very thing they’ve been gone from is time?

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