Considering we are each allotted only two of these in our lifetime, it wasn’t hard to choose who I was going to see. It had taken a long time to invent this complex apparatus and the necessary safety protocols, so I was already seventy-two by the time the system was functional. The thirty-minute time limit seemed provocative and a little cruel, like something an obnoxious tech-bro might invent. Yet, I learned it was the Earth’s gravitational force, coupled with a specific thermal energy gradient that was the reason for the time limit in the 2027 Peri-Linear Tube.

I restyled my long hair into layers to make it shapelier around my face. The fresh cut mitigated some of my nerves but not all. I wore jeans, sneakers, and my favorite adobe-colored V-neck sweater. As instructed in the email, at five minutes before midnight, I removed my watch, stepped outside and waited in front of my condo, number thirty seven. Soon, a single-person craft soundlessly appeared and a portal spontaneously opened. As I stepped forward, a relaxed voice, a familiar one, announced, “This is your transport to your H and D.”

The email had told me to expect this announcement, with the initials of their first names, so I hopped in. It had to be the right craft.

The moment I entered, the craft began to surge upward. The inside was filled with a midnight blue background and the attenuated light of shimmering ivory stars. This sky unfolded for three hundred and sixty degrees, I felt as though I was laying alone in the Utah desert, looking up into the glorious night. Soon enough, there were air currents circulating around my body, and I was traveling directly through the universe. Within seconds, a shooting star sprinted by, leaving black burn marks on the tips of my sneakers.

The next thing I remembered was the subtle reconstitution of the craft around my body. The same voice that had announced its arrival at the condo was now informing me that we were landing shortly. No seat belt or tray tables were involved. The craft stopped accelerating forward and after a short suspension in midair, it flowed and swayed smoothly to the ground.

At some point, time as a recognizable concept had drifted from my consciousness, and now, I wasn’t sure if ten minutes or an entire night had elapsed. Still, I felt energized and ready to see them.

I stepped out of my craft, stood up straight, and began to scan the area. Helene and David, my parents, were waiting for me, sitting together in a curvy, mustard-yellow bumper car that had number sixty-seven decaled on the bulge of the front end. Immediately, I knew this was the exact bumper car we all liked to drive, when I was a child, at Ocean City Amusement Park.

I couldn’t stop staring at them. My parents were much younger than when I last saw them. Soon I caught on: they were in their fifties, their ages when we last rode the bumper cars together. I smiled at them and held the moment—the exact moment I had been waiting for.

We each walked away from our vehicles—I, the craft, and they, the bumper car—and onto a platform with a comfy-looking, circular, indigo-blue couch. We embraced. Our faces met in the center with our foreheads balanced. I took in my mom’s aroma first: lemony with a hint of perfume. My dad smelled like his old shaving cream.

“Oh Wow. Wow. So wonderful to see you,” I finally eked out.

“You too,” they whispered, smiling.

After that, I had no other words. I had planned to share with them a collection of positive, humorful and tragic things. Of course, the four-time–indicted and twice-impeached, fascist former president was one of them, but they never, in a million years, would have believed that that man would have become president anyhow. I did want them to know how much they were loved, missed and appreciated, but the impetus for using any words had evaporated.

Soon the sounds of breaking waves and clamorous gulls beckoned us to the ocean. We walked down four steps to the fine yellow sand of the beach. My parents’ old lawn chairs and a towel for me were set on a plateau of sand just before the landscape’s descent onto the continental shelf and into the roiling water. A warm and gentle breeze flowed, the sun low in the morning sky. Three of the deep black and green Japanese serving bowls I had given them decades ago were filled with red chunks of watermelon, one bowl for each of us.

This beach, or nearly any beach, hadn’t simply been a source of fun and relaxation for our family. Beaches had always been transformational: we’d rocket from dysfunctional and mean to kinder and more openhearted. Everybody would just become their best possible selves. Was it the vigorous and calm rotations of the ocean with its abundant negative ions, the warmth of sand and sun, or just the joy of playing in salt water? Who knew?

My dad sat calmly eating his watermelon, allowing juice to roll down his chin. He was so relaxed. His hazel eyes, reassuring and intense, connected with mine. I had never fully registered their color and beauty when he was alive; I felt as though I could never see his eyes, or for that matter the rest of him. My mother’s big brown eyes beamed love at me.

I was with them, on the beach, eating my watermelon, slowly exchanging breaths, in and out. My memories, from toddler to adulthood, became my consciousness, in color, organized and chronological. The loving, awesome, befuddling, tragic, angering, funny, silly, and profound realities of growing up human on planet Earth flowed through me. I saw everything with enhanced and unwavering compassion—for every event and being, every mosquito, best friend, classmate, hater, flower, compatriot, principle, self, parent, librarian, dog and bear I had ever interacted with. I also saw my parents’ lives, the early ones I had only imagined from the pictures and too few stories.

I processed it, this time with the brilliance of sunlight and ocean, in this new atmosphere. It was my own multiverse-omniverse-quantum-realm movie. I suspected my parents had been privy to their own movie too. Soon, my movie stopped, and we were sitting on the sand together, all lighter and connected by the touching of our sticky, watermelon-laden hands and abutting hips. I was filled up with a quiet joy, with no need to do or say anything. By then the sun was shimmering on the edge of the ocean, and the sky was streaked with hues of pink and orange. A full moon was rising.

Next, my body spontaneously performed a high-velocity backward flip, landing me on the indigo couch. I knew what this meant. One more flip and I was back inside the portal of my craft. I awoke in my own bed at number thirty-seven, wearing my adobe sweater, jeans and sneakers with distinct black burn marks on their tips, hands and face sticky. And at peace.