The gymnasium smelled exactly as it had in 1999—like floor wax and teenage desperation. I adjusted my dress, feeling a little out of place among the sea of people wearing name tags with their high school yearbook photos.
“You okay?” I asked my husband, Mark.
He looked distracted, his eyes scanning the crowd. “Yeah. Just… memories.”
We had built a good life. Two decades. A house with a paid-off mortgage. A dog. A shared history of inside jokes and Sunday morning pancakes. I thought we were solid as rock.
Then, he saw her.
“He saw his high school sweetheart,” a woman named Jessica who hadn’t aged a day since senior year.
Mark stiffened. He walked over to her, leaving me by the punch bowl. I watched them talk. They laughed. And then, the DJ played a slow song—something by K-Ci & JoJo.
“They danced once,” I told myself, clutching my plastic cup. It’s harmless. It’s just nostalgia.
Mark came back to me after the song, but he didn’t come back to me. His eyes were glazed over. He was physically present, but mentally, he was eighteen again, parked at lookout point with Jessica.
We drove home in silence. I thought he was just tired.
The next morning, I was making coffee when he walked into the kitchen. He wasn’t wearing his pajamas. He was dressed.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“About the reunion?” I asked, pouring him a mug.
“About us,” he said. He didn’t take the coffee. “The next morning, he told me he realized he had settled for me.“.
The mug slipped from my hand and shattered on the floor.
“Settled?” I whispered. “Mark, we’ve been married for twenty years. We have a life.”
“I know,” he said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “But last night… I felt something I haven’t felt in years. With her. I realized I’ve been sleepwalking. I never loved you the way I loved her.”
“He filed for divorce to chase a ghost from 20 years ago,” believing that one dance could resurrect a relationship that ended when Clinton was president.
He packed a bag. He told me he was going to “win her back,” ignoring the fact that she was also married, ignoring the fact that high school ended two decades ago.
He walked out the door, destroying the life we built for a high school memory.
I stood in the kitchen, surrounded by the shards of my favorite mug and the ruins of my marriage. He had thrown away a real, tangible, breathing love for a fantasy wrapped in tulle and nostalgia. He left to chase a time traveler’s dream, leaving me to clean up the mess of the reality he had shattered.
