Gabriel Jeroschewitz, December 2nd, 2025, A could be Valentine’s story, abridged
The Kaleidoscope: A Quirky Love Story
I have seen them before they knew each other, which is to say, I have seen them before they remembered each other. That’s the problem with human perception: we start the book halfway through and announce the first page.
He, Adrian Vale, had the sort of handsomeness that seemed misplaced in our era. A face that belonged to a sepia photograph, wearing the kind of half-smile that made strangers feel they’d either met him before or were about to. He carried himself like someone perpetually listening to music no one else could hear.
She, Liora, was beautiful in a way that made you wonder whether beauty itself remembered her. Her laugh had weight and texture, like silk falling in slow motion. People often remarked on her eyes — not for their colour, which was an indeterminate shade shifting between green and gold — but for the way they seemed to be conducting two different conversations, one in this world, and one somewhere else entirely.
They met — if that’s the correct word — on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in the atrium of the City Museum of Science and Mysticism. The museum was half an actual institute of physics and half an eccentric private collection. Whether the two halves were connected in any meaningful way was anybody’s guess.
The rain had chased Adrian indoors. He was idly reading an exhibit plaque about quantum entanglement when Liora walked in, shaking rainwater from her hair.
From my vantage point — somewhere between reality and its imagined echo — I noticed the way the air thickened slightly, as though the atoms rearranged themselves to accommodate their proximity. To ordinary observers, it might have been nothing more than an attraction. But to me, it looked precisely like string theory’s vibrating filaments tugging at each other across dimensions.
You see, in one version of reality — call it World A — they had been married for years. In World B, they had never spoken. In our present frame — the one I am narrating — it was still undecided.
The museum’s curator, an older man with the enthusiasm of thirteen-year-old boys before a fireworks show, noticed them standing side by side. “This,” he announced to no one in particular, gesturing at the entanglement display, “is how an infinite distance can separate two particles and yet instantly affect each other’s state. Fascinating, isn’t it?” He winked and shuffled away.
Adrian glanced sideways at Liora.
“Do you believe that?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said, smiling faintly. “Some things are real whether we believe in them or not.”
Whether this was flirtation or philosophy, I could not tell. Not yet.
Over the following weeks, they met again, and again. Sometimes by arrangement, sometimes by coincidence — though in quantum terms, those are merely different labels for the same thing.
Their conversations drifted between ordinary banter and peculiar metaphysics. One evening over coffee, Liora sighed, saying,
“Sometimes I think I live between imagining and reality. I can feel something stirring just out of sight, like the world is leaning close, asking me to show what’s inside my mind.”
Adrian grinned. “That’s poetic.”
“It’s an affliction,” she replied, amused.
He told her that when he was a boy, he used to draw maps of places that didn’t exist, convinced they might. Later, he learned about the “many-worlds” theory and felt a strange vindication — perhaps the places he’d mapped did exist in some other branch of reality.
I will admit, they were funny together — not because they told jokes, but because they treated absurdities as usual.
There are moments in human courtship when you can feel the kaleidoscope turn. One pattern vanishes, another blooms. For them, it happened in the museum’s mirrored corridor—an installation meant to demonstrate symmetry, reflection, and the statistical improbability of identical lives.
They stood there, facing each other, and the mirrors multiplied their images into infinity. Except… as I watched, I saw something peculiar: in one reflection, they kissed. In another, they walked away in opposite directions. And in yet another, they stood still, gazing but not moving — as though action itself had failed to load.
Adrian noticed her staring at their infinite copies.
“Which do you prefer?” he asked.
She said softly, “The one where we walk toward each other forever, but never arrive.”
He raised an eyebrow, amused. “That sounds terrible.”
“It might be,” she murmured, “but the longing would keep us alive.”
By now, the worlds were tugging at them. You could feel it — like static electricity before a storm. Their lives outside the museum were pulling them in separate directions, yet each conversation seemed reluctant to end.
One evening, as twilight washed the city in broken light, Adrian invited her to an observatory café on the edge of the river. A jazz trio played in the corner. They sat by the window, watching the lights blur into reflections.
“I think,” Adrian began carefully, “that you and I met before this life. Maybe many times. Maybe we’re just remembering.”
Liora looked at him for a long moment.
“That would explain the rain,” she said.
He laughed. “What rain?”
“The rain that falls when the borders start to fade,” she said. “Between imagining and real.”
And here is where the narrative splits.
That night, they walked together along the river. At a stone bridge, she stopped and turned to him. Their hands brushed — just brushed — and something warm passed through both of them, the kind of warmth you feel in a dream just before waking.
He leaned closer, as if to kiss her. But she only smiled and stepped back.
“You can’t hold onto the light once you touch it,” she said softly.
“Will I see you again?”
“You will,” she promised, “but not here.”
In the days that followed, they drifted apart — not from choice, but from the gentle erosion of practical life. Yet sometimes, in quiet moments, Adrian would feel the echo of her presence, as though some other reality had kept them together. And in her own life, Liora would occasionally glance across a crowded street and imagine his face in the distance, smiling that misplaced smile.
Neither forgot. The longing itself became a kind of companionship.
In this version, after the observatory meeting, Adrian walks her to the station. The night feels strange — overly quiet, as though the city has been temporarily paused.
They stand together under a flickering streetlamp. He wants to tell her something urgent, something that will seal this connection before reality rearranges. But no words will come.
She stares at him with those two-conversation eyes and says, “Not every world lets us meet. This might be the one that doesn’t.”
The train arrives. She steps aboard without looking back.
Adrian remains there until the train vanishes, listening to the lingering hum of its departure. But later, he cannot remember whether she was ever really there at all — or whether he had imagined her entirely.
And somewhere in the infinite mirrors of the kaleidoscope, there is a version in which they held hands, another in which they kissed, and another in which they turned away without recognition.
But this one — the reality I have just told you — he walks home alone under the rain, and the line between imagining and reality has dissolved into darkness.
