Have you ever played “What if?” about your past loves?

Not because you’re discontent with today’s love, just curious about the possibilities of another dimension of the multiverse.

I’m fortunate that my relationships have almost all ended amicably, usually with one of us leaving the country, still happy together but quite literally moving in different directions, not yet deep enough in each other’s lives to support the challenges of an intercontinental relationship. Maybe knowing that we’re all still on good terms and even casually in touch on social media makes it easier to speculate about an imaginary far future where we slide into each other’s DMs and rekindle something that might have been extinguished prematurely.

In a short piece of fiction titled “Reboot,” I’ve remixed a few old lovers and projected them into a writers’ conference set in my late middle age.

He valued the professional relationship they were building, writer to writer, sharing ideas, critiques, new markets to try. It would be self-sabotaging to jeopardize all that they had rebuilt between them for this rush of hormones he had almost forgotten he could have. He was no stranger to self-sabotage, and this time he was determined to recognize it and nip it in the bud.

Seeing her here, though — in the flesh, flawed and vulnerable and more beautiful than ever….

Read the whole re-meet-cute in the February 2023 issue, Writing Love, of Voices de la Luna: A Quarterly Literature & Arts Magazine, under the pseudonym Rhea Callum.