Lost time.

There were lapses in times " days at lengths " which neither of us can recall. Chunks of minutes and hours that slunk away quietly, only to blend into some garbled time line of other amnesiac memories.

Days later, we would wake up from reveries. Wars had begun - somewhere in distant, exotic lands, skirmishes had snowballed into battles- cities were bombed, histories razed, men and women alike scattered carelessly like marbles, carrion for undiscerning scavengers. But us, well we cannot remember.

We waited for messy packages of future moments, wrapped callously in torn pages from our datebooks - we waited and waited. But they are lost in transition, in a careless oversight of some Cosmic Post Office. I wonder who received them. Will they revel in our misplaced moments, as we might have?

Only a handful of countries away, the grounds quivered with grief and thousands were swallowed into its bowels. The earth rumbled and tumbled with discomfort, mountains spat fires and molten curses, rivers bled with rage - but us, well we cannot remember. We lay in a temporary repose, in the eye of the storm.

I have wondered if Time is no more than a wandering troubadour across countless universes that exist concomitantly. Does It make a brief, insouciant sojourn in ours? And when it leaves, as violently as It comes, do we sink into an unremitting timelessness? And what are these inexplicable days then, but glimpses of life at the edge of lifelessness?

We cannot remember, we cannot.

It became a lilting game of finding clues, of piecing together a narrative of those unaccountable days. With a jarful of disjointed hints, we invented kaleidoscopic memoirs. They dissolved just as easily as they had evolved. Shaken by faith, they rearranged themselves to form yet another colorfully detailed carapace.

We would lie besides each other, in cocoons of familiarity, wrapped only in ourselves and within ourselves, and we would conjecture. We spun wild fairy tales of ghosts and aliens, of jealous time-robbers, until we would retire in peals of laughter at our own absurdity.

We blamed clocks, and their flimsy hands too unreliable to keep watch. Time cannot fail, but archaic man-made contraptions could, we deduced. We conscientiously switched to digital clocks soon after, finding solace in their neon-green readings.

Late into nights, we would speak of myths and legends of time-travelers, of God the Ultimate Watchmaker, of heroes and epic journeys. We would pose theories until we drifted off holding hands.

Oh, we had a lot of explanations, you and I, but never certainty. We were creators of fiction, not satisfaction. Whatever our beliefs, we conceded that we would never solve The Mystery of the Missing Days.

Years have raced passed us now; we have become unconcerned, as our curiosity dissipates. We have learned to live comfortably with our historic pasts. We no longer question it, only accepted it as unquestionable. Our paths have diverged, and we have rebuilt our lives in different corners of the world, our worlds. We have submitted our souls to token jobs, jaded romances, and white picket fences. All this, when we once floated upon wispy pallets in the surreal forests of our beings.

But we live in reality now and what a shit hole it really is.

I have not seen you in seventeen years. Each year is etched indelibly in my being as if to compensate for those days that left no trails. I wonder who you are now. Wherever you are, I wish to tell you " I have solved The Mystery of the Missing Days. It took me seventeen years, but I have the answer now.

You see, I sat down, and I thought and I thought. In my mind, I ran every permutation and combination of what could have happened. In my mind, I processed a million time lines, crisscrossing each other at every interval and every segment. I drew flowcharts, and concocted algorithms, drafted maps, and speculated explanations at cosmic and microcosmic levels. And when I had exhausted every iota of reason, every minutiae of logic, I understood.

The last thing I remember before we dissolved into our own personal timelessness, is that we had just fallen in love.