Picture your greatest moment. Your absolute favorite. Don't picture the day. Don't picture the time. Go back, really back, to the greatest moment you've ever experienced.

Feel it.

Live in it. 

You're twenty-nine. You've been awake for two full days. Tired. Hungry. Nervous. No, not nervous. Fucking terrified. Finally, after what feels like years of pacing and waiting you look down at what the doctor's handed you and there she is. Your perfect baby girl. All mom's eyes and dad's nose, with the lungs of an Olympic swimmer. She's perfect, healthy, and finally here.

You're eighteen. You've practiced for this over and over. Nights in the dark. Early morning runs. Late night games. There's nothing after this - no college ball, no pro ball. There's just here and now. A ticking clock. The ball in your hand. A fake pump. A direct shot. A championship in your hands.

You're seven. You should be in school. You're terrified. Dad’s got your hand and mom’s watching from close by. Up. Up. Up. Higher. Higher. Higher. There. Right there. Before the roller coaster drops. Before your stomach flip-flops. Before all of that, you freeze at the top as you remember your friends all stuck in school while you spend the day at the happiest place on Earth. 

Do you have it? Your one perfect moment? Hold it. Let it fill you up. 

Now… feel your worst. The actual worst moment of your life. You can do it, you can let yourself get there. 

You’re twenty-four. They promised you’d have until Christmas. You knew time was limited, but the doctors all thought you’d at least have Christmas. Here you are, three weeks before and the phone rings. No one needs to tell you what the phone call means. There’s nothing that should have tipped you off, but something inside you knows. The scream that comes out of you is awful. Guttural. A millions things will fly through your head. Memories. Fears. And plans. Plans, plans, plans. But stop here, in the scream. Stop in the moment that you first know she’s gone. 

You can have your greatest moment again. You can have every great moment again.

The catch - you have to take it all again. The good and the bad. The perfect and the broken. 

That’s how it works. 

The choice is quick and simple. It happens in the moment right before death. Everything freezes and you’re presented with a choice. 

1 - Pass over. It’s done. Heaven, reincarnation, a period of rest. However you view it, you move on to whatever you view that next place to be. 

2 - Restart. You get to do it all again. Every last moment - while changing nothing. Even something as simple as going right instead of left could change everything.

When the moment comes, he has eighty-seven years to look back on. Eighty-seven years of heartache and love. Kids and Grandkids. Jobs and wars. Love and hate. When the time comes though, and he has to make his choice, there is only one moment that really matters. 

Seventeen. Blueberry fields. Lips stained blue, freckles just beginning to appear, and blonde hair blowing free. It’s hard to really know what love is the first time you feel it. With a lack of reference point, he only knows he can’t take his eyes off of her and that he never wants to.

Eighty-seven years and he wants to live it all again, as long as it means he gets all his time with her again. Even his worst moment ever. He’ll take it. He just wants more time. He just wants her. So, with her face in his mind and her name on his lips, he begins. Again. 

The beginning is all the same. 

Memories come in slivers of light. Moments with Grandpa, gone by his third birthday, are somehow sweeter with the knowledge that this time is limited. 

But the repetition of life means nothing real to him. It’s simply the circular repetition of a series of minutes and days.

When he was six, he was left at the grocery store. This round, however, he knows he will not be forgotten forever with the rice. Instead, his mom is only in the other aisle. Searching for cereal, and a few seconds from realizing he’s gone. 

Although it would be so easy to just return to her, he instead plays out the part and walks outside of the store, as his mom continues to look for him. Panic growing as she asks employees and strangers.

Nothing real changes, but now he knows his mom didn’t abandon him. He knows exactly how much time they have together. Not enough, to be certain. It never could be, but they still have decades together.

Life continues, exactly as it has before, for seventeen years made excruciatingly long by the countdown he has in his head.

It will be 8 years until he meets her. 3 years. 22 months. 8 months. 36 weeks. 17 days. 4 hours. A reward for a life half-lived so long without her. 

And then. 

She’s exactly what he remembers. How could she be anything, but? In the years following this moment, he’d tell this story over and over. In a smile to strangers in the store. As a bedtime story to their kids. Over dinner to their grandkids. In whispered kisses to her. 

Babies. Babies of babies. Graduations. Jobs. Weddings. His life had been a series of perfection, and it all led back to this moment.

A Tuesday.

He should have been helping out on the farm, but his friends had convinced him the fields could wait. Instead, he was sneaking out to the lake for the day.

If anything in his life had changed, nothing would ever be the same. So when the time comes that he’s finally able to see her or the first time, again, he’s all the more grateful for every stupid choice he was forced to make again. 

Because, as promised, there she is. Picking blueberries in her daddy’s field. The summer sun has brought out a smattering of freckles across her cheeks. This time, when he looks at her, he knows that she’s only out here because her brother is sick. He knows she’s bored and mad, and has seven other things she’d rather be doing. 

He wants to stop. Hold this moment in his head even stronger than it already is.

He also wants to run to her. To hold her tight. To feel again the way her cheek feels against his. To glide his fingers across the small of her back. To take her to dinner and then immediately to get married.

To rush and steal time.

Instead he forces himself to take smaller steps, knowing anything could ruin everything. So when he finally makes it across the street and finds himself standing a frustrating eight steps away, his skin aching for hers, he once again asks her where the lake is; and she, once again, looks at him like a fool and points just behind her. The lake unmissable from where they stand. 

In the 87 years it’s taken to get back to this moment, he’d known that he’d loved her fiercely and immediately in this exact second.

What he couldn’t have been prepared for, is how much more he’d love her.

His love for her grows impossibly, as he convinces her to have dinner with him.

Then, everything he waited for impatiently for was finally there.

A dinner. Then dinners. Going steady. A wedding. Baby. Baby Baby. Grandson. Granddaughter. Grandtwins. Love. Love. Love. 

He’d only had one life, but he’d lived it twice and knew now that there was nothing he’d rather do. 

Suddenly, they’re fifty. Suddenly, it’s a Tuesday again and they’re out of milk. 

Such a silly, impossibly unnecessary item.

He knows she needs to be the one to get the milk, and he knows what it will mean if she does. 

These are the final moments before their lives become forever split in two. Before he becomes forever split in two.

The only way the restart works is if she goes to the store for milk, and never comes back. Anything else is chaos. A butterfly flapping its wings. A ripple in time. Blah blah bullshit. 

None of that matters in the slightest, however, because here in this moment there is only one truth – he was denied 37 years with the love of his life. And he’ll risk the butterflies, ripples, and chaos, to get them.

So before she leaves, he simply takes the keys on a smile and promises to return with milk. 

The simple act of walking out the door feels like a taunt for the universe. 

He grips his steering wheel the whole time he drives, trying to think of the last time he broke a rule and coming up empty. 

When he returns home, he opens the door slowly; half expecting to find her gone in spite of his actions. 

Instead she's sitting on the couch, sewing a quilt; wholly unaware that what he's just done has changed everything in ways they couldn't possibly understand yet. 

He stares dumbly at the milk. Not sure what to do next. The last 50 years were spent in a blissful charade of paint by numbers. Now, he could do anything. 

Anything.

The milk gets put in the fridge and the preheated oven turned off. Tonight, he wants to take her out to dinner. Tonight he will start writing their future, and it begins at their favorite steakhouse, spending money they don’t have in celebration of what she believes is nothing, and he knows is everything. 

The next morning, before he musters the courage to open his eyes, he considers what he’s done. The consequences that he knows he’ll have to face. When he opens his eyes and sees her there, his stomach only unknots a little.

Each day his fears are only slightly relieved when he wakes up and finds her still there. Or gets out of the shower, and sees she’s still there. Comes home from work, and sees she’s still there.

Maybe he had it wrong. Maybe they’d slipped through the cracks. Maybe he really could change anything.

Nine months after he gets milk for her, a butterfly flaps its wings and he comes home to find her a mess of tears on the ground in the kitchen, the phone held lamely in her hands.

Their daughter. 

32 years old, with a son of her own. Smarter, prettier, better than he could have ever hoped to be.

A robbery of all things. Money from a register. A bullet from a gun. A daughter from their lives.

He finds himself alone in his grief, as the only one who knows the true outcome. He killed her first. He’d killed her nine months earlier when he saved his wife. How can he truly grieve her, when grieving her means he regrets saving his wife? 

So he finds himself alone, pulling further and further from everyone. 

He pulls himself seven years away from his wife who gives him five last chances and finally walks out the door.

She leaves him. It’s almost seven years later this time, but she’s still gone and he still has to wait out the rest of his life, a miserable 28 years, without the wife he only wanted to save and the daughter he killed. 

Finally, mercifully, he’s eighty-seven, a bout of pneumonia takes a turn and this tiny hell he’s built is over.

Getting the choice again is some sort of punishment, he knows. A better man would say no.

He knows he should turn it down, but he just can’t leave it like that. He can’t let the world, any world, continue without his daughter.

It’s wrong. Stupid. Reckless. Even so, he closes his eyes and begins again.

This time he can’t change anything. This time he understands. So he does it all exactly as he always had, just deeper.

He looks at her more. Knowing where the end is, the closer her gets to it, the tighter he holds her. The tighter he holds her, the further she wants to fly.

A week before she’s supposed to get milk, she goes to stay at her sister’s house and tells him she doesn’t think she can come back.

She never goes for milk.

Instead she moves out and leaves him alone. Bitter.

Not even his kids can stand to be around him. 

He hears family news from friends of the family. When his Grandson gets sick, it’s a neighbor that tells him. He tries to connect with his son. Tries to be a dad. Or even just a human.

He never hears back. He sees the notice in the paper – the funeral is across town and they’ll never understand how it kills him to know his presence isn’t welcome. 

From the parking lot, he watches the funeral let out. His wife, with shorter hair and a taller husband, cries.

He goes home and drinks away the next three decades. It’s lonely and dark, and when he finally goes, it’s the first time he’s smiled in fifty years.

It’s not a choice he’s aware of this time. He has to do it. He has to make it right. He has to fix what he’s done. 

And so, once more, he begins. Again.

It’s his fourth time beginning. Fourth time doing everything exactly as he’s done it before. 

He thinks.

Eighty-seven years, four times, can be hard to remember. What shirt did he wear to his first day of high school? What time did he go to football practice the day he was late and had to run laps? Was it a Tuesday or Wednesday he took his cousin fishing?

The passage of time finds its breath in repetition, and now his memories cloud him. He stutters. Chokes.

Somewhere he’d messed up, taken a left when he meant right. Now when he shows up to the blueberry fields, he instead finds her brother there. The youngest he’s ever seen him. Her brother who, a year from now, would be lost in the bamboo jungle of Vietnam, plucks blueberries with a beautiful ignorance he’d give anything for. 

Turning around, he heads home. Now, more than ever, he’s lost. 

He returns to the fields the next day. Hoping, and coming up empty. He goes back for a week, before finally coming to terms with what he’s done.

He’s already lost her. He’s lost her so many times, but never like this. Never without at least being able to first see her. 

Resolved to spend 70 years alone, without being able to fix the unfixable, he tries to move on and fails. 

Once, he sees her coming out of a wedding dress shop with her mother. She looks towards him and a million memories slam against him. He almost waves. What if he waved? What if he stopped her from marring whoever she’s going to marry, and he has one more chance to fix this?

He promises himself that this is his last time doing this. He’ll never be this age again. He’ll never do any of this again. So what’s the harm in trying? He’s lost so much, and is so lost already. 

Still. He thinks. Still, he could simply lift his hand and pull her attention away from her mom and her dress and her future. Surely she’d recognize him. Surely she’d see in him the same thing she’d seen in those blueberry fields so many lifetimes ago.

He knew her. Her eyes could never simply pass over his and not feel the same pull that he feels. The same love and power he’d never been able to let go.

Her eyes meet his and his hand feels weightless as it floats into the air, about to wave. Then, without any warning, her eyes move past his. He is unrecognizable to her. She moves on, forcing him to do the same.

When he sees her wedding announcement in the paper, that’s exactly what he does. He buys a new place a few towns over. In the mornings, he takes the bike out to the lake and watches the sun rise. At night, in the winters, he builds a fire and stays up until the wood turns to ash. 

It’s almost enough to erase the pain in his bones. The knowledge that his stupidity has taken everything from him dulls slightly with each day. 

Days pass without note, blending into weeks. Fifty-one weeks to be exact. Fifty-one quiet, insignificant, and perfectly exiguous weeks. Until he stops by the diner on the way home, and his meal isn’t ready yet. The waitress apologizes and gives him a cup of coffee on the house while he waits. 

Three cups of coffee later, and he’s laughing more than he has in lifetimes. 

Four months older than him, she seems so much younger. Carefree. Things he hadn’t been in hundreds of years. He remembers now what it feels like to be young. To be happy. To be in love.

Everything feels so new and fresh. He’d loved his wife, but somehow he finds that loves this woman too. He’s filled with love in a way he didn’t know he could be. He forgets that this is not his life. That just didn’t seem to be true any more. Every other time he’d restarted, he wasn’t living his life. Just fixing it. Walking through the motions.

This is different. He can make choices here. He can be happy here. He chooses to propose on a Saturday and he thinks he’ll burst when she walks down the aisle. When he sees his parents sitting in the pews, his heart swells to realize this is his forth time getting married, but the first time his dad has been alive for it. 

It’s utopia. 

Then it becomes something better. A world beyond utopia. A word that doesn’t even exist yet. 

When he looks at his daughter, sleeping perfectly in her crib, she wakes up and smiles at him. And he sees them. This daughter, their only child, carries with her the looks and spirit of the kids he’d had to say goodbye to the day he lost his wife in the blueberry fields so many years ago.

They’re here. The last missing piece of his heart finds it way to him. He’s whole.

Finally. 

This time it’s him that goes first. Unimaginably, because there’s still so much time left for them. He’s 87, but he feels so much younger. 

He wants his life again.

He’s a selfish bastard for it, he knows. But he wants this life again. This one, he’s sure, he would not screw up. Wouldn’t hold too tight, because she’d never leave him. Wouldn’t stop her from doing anything. He understands what ripples and wrinkles to do time now, and he’s sure that he won’t do anything to screw it up this time. 

He knows all too well that he’s lost his roadmap. His lived lifetimes, finding the love of his lives not once, but twice. He will have to find her in a hazy collection of memories that are no clearer to him than the choice of which love he’s looking for. 

He has free will for the first time since the first time. Now, when the end comes, he simply closes his eyes - and restarts.