It’s been six months to the day since my fiancé never made it to the airport. Well, if we want to get technical about it, he made it to the airport; the plane just didn’t land where it was supposed to. It somehow landed on its head. How bad of a pilot do you have to be to literally flip the plane upside-down? Is that even possible? These are the questions that have been plaguing me since the accident, and because of them, my therapist won’t stop telling me I’m placing blame on the pilot as a defense mechanism.

​

I walked out of my therapist’s office midsession today because if she doesn’t keep telling me the same thing, she’s going to have one less client here pretty soon.

​

I’m walking into the coffee shop where I met my soulmate four years ago. Most people nowadays meet people online because people have accepted meet-cutes don’t happen anymore, but my story proves them wrong. I’m 23, I wasn’t born in the 90s; I was born a millennial, and despite having plenty of swipes left, I chose the man who asked for my number ten times. He wasn’t a stalker, I promise.

 

What I never tell anyone is that it was the eyebrows. He has the thickest, darkest eyebrows, sometimes I thought they were cocoons soon-to-be butterflies. Scratch that. He had the darkest eyebrows. Man, I gotta get better at this whole talk in the past tense thing.

​

I sit at the table that we sat at. One would think that I would avoid it like covid, but there’s a magnet pulling me to the same seat. It’s like I’m not allowed to go anywhere else. I’ve tried sitting in the other seats, and my coffee is always cold when I sit in them.

​

The waitress who works here is my best friend. Her name is Holly, and she gets the most tips out of any other girl here. Sure, she’s pretty and she looks good in her skirted uniform, but it’s more than that. She’s a reincarnation of the sun. Literally. The other day, some old man was yelling at her, telling her how soggy his waffles were, and after thirty seconds of her whispering in his ear, his waffles disappeared from his plate; it was shiny clean, not a drop of syrup left. He started telling her about how he was a war vet and was telling her this super scary story about the trenches. His eyes went big as he told the story. Now whenever he comes in, he always asks for Holly. I tried to get his order once to help Holly out, but when I tried to ask him about his war time, he simply handed me his plate of uneaten food.

​

Only Holly knows how to get people to open up. Every guy I dated before my dead fiancé, I never opened up to. They always talked about how much they hated their job and that was pretty much it, but my dead fiancé, we would talk about what they call pseudoscientific questions like if aliens are real or if reincarnation is a thing and if we thought we’d end up together in our reincarnated selves—

​

After Holly brings me my hot mocha, I blow her a kiss as she goes to tend to the other tables. “Look at you go, Superwoman. Showing me up as always, making more money than me too.”

​

“Hey Tae, it was your choice to be a journalist.”

​

“And I didn’t say I didn’t love it. Just that I want more money, and who doesn’t? What do you say we share your tips for the day?”

​

“You wish.”

​

I take a sip and feel a jabbing pain hit my tongue. After three tries of nothing but stutters coming out, I give up on talking and look at the newspaper instead. I wrote the article on the first page. It’s about a man who is homeless attacking the mayor. Something that would only happen here in NYC.

​

“I already read it,” Holly said while skipping to pour coffee in five different cups at five separate tables. She has all regulars here. There’s a couple who are elderly, a young couple, and two teenage best friends that look like Holly and me when we were in high school. It’s a small little shop with a slippery tiled floor and a bunch of black-and-white photos of this place years ago; it’s passed down through Holly’s family.

​

“Would it kill you to do a story that’s, you know, a little more upbeat?” she teases.

​

“Says the optimist,” I shout.

​

Everyone is stretching their ears out, eavesdropping on us. “All you write are sad things since Hunter d—“

​

“You can say it,” I interrupt. It’s something my therapist would probably address as another stupid defense mechanism: that I get angry easily.

​

It isn’t until I turn my head at the front door that I realize I never interrupted Holly at all and that she simply grew inarticulate as she dropped the entire pot of coffee on the ground; thankfully it’s empty but it still makes a huge clang, almost as big as the one my jaw makes.

​

“Hunter?” I ask. I almost dial 911 and offer myself up to the psych ward. This isn’t possible.

​

He comes in wearing the same exact thing he was wearing when we first met. Granted he would wear the same t-shirts all the time. He was a band geek and had a bunch of t-shirts all made by the same band. I don’t know why I’m referencing him in the past tense anymore because he’s standing right in front of me! He hair is still black and his face is cleanly-shaven the way I like it, and he’s in jeans without any rips in them.

​

I do what my gut tells me to do and I run into his arms, and I kiss him. Or I try to kiss him. He pulls away and his eyes narrow on me; he turns his entire body away from me, using his bulky arms as a shield against me.

​

“Do I know you?” he asks, “I mean you’re cute, but I’m not sure we’ve met?”

​

“You just look like someone I used to know,” I say. Maybe I’m in the past for some odd reason, reliving the day we met? Is it normal for fictional plots to come true for some people, because just the other day I watched a thriller about a girl’s husband coming back to life. And he turned out to be evil so . . .

​

I take a step back. Holly is with me, she’s on my side. “Tae, you can stop the prank now. I’ve had enough.”

​

“Trust me, I’m just as weirded out as you,” I whisper.

​

“You two do know I can hear everything you’re saying.”

​

“Tae’s finance died six months ago, and you’re him,” Holly blabbers; she’s never able to stop herself. “And she’s been super sad and while I’m very weirded out that you’re here right now, I’m more happy because it means Tae can stop being sad.”

​

“You really don’t remember me?” I ask ‘Hunter.’

​

“I wish I did. I really do.”

​

It isn’t until I go to say something else to Holly and realize that she’s disappeared along with all of her customers that my sci-fi fanatic self decides I’m in some alternate dimension.

​

All the tables disappear and the cash register disappears and I watch as the first day we met happens all over again. Hunter runs into me and I play along with the whole thing. I’ve never been a theatre fan but this is the one play I have no problem reenacting. No bribes needed. I’ll do it willingly for years on end if that means I get to see Hunter’s face.

​

He talks to me about my writing dreams and I tell him again about how my mom kicked me out because my writing wasn’t paying the bills. And he tells me all about his mom cheating on his dad and getting divorced and how he just dropped out of med school. And we talk and talk and talk.

​

And when it’s time for him to walk out the door, he walks out, and suddenly Holly is back again and everyone’s back and Hunter walks in and the same thing happens again.

​

And then I realize two things. I realize I’m stuck in a time loop.

​

And I realize I need to freaking move on.