It had been several weeks since the encounter with my reflected self. It had shaken me to the core and left me questioning the makeup of my reality while wishing and hoping that Veronica would come back.

Was I crazy?

I retained all my faculties, but I’m sure a crazy person would convince himself of that.

Was I seeing a ghost?

If I was, then why was I also seeing ghosts of Eleanor and myself?

Maybe we were all dead and this was the version of purgatory or hell that I am stuck in.

Every day these logic puzzles would bounce around my mind. I was useless at work. My boss told me to take some time off. When I came in the next day anyway, he told me not to return until I was back to my usual self. Without the distraction of work, I could feel myself slipping into a black hole of obsession over these encounters.

I started seeing the impact on Eleanor, as well. I was silent and distant, lost in thought, so she was silent too. Days would go by without us talking, except for me asking for her to perform tasks: get dressed, brush your teeth, go to bed. A few nights ago after I tucked her in, while I was sitting on the floor waiting for her to fall asleep, I could hear her crying into her pillow. If Veronica were here, she would comfort her and ask her why she was so sad. I knew what the answer was: I wasn’t being a good dad.

The next morning, I called my parents and had them take Eleanor for a few days. Without her as a distraction, my entire day was spent thinking and theorizing about these recent events. I searched online for various articles about ghosts. Most came from sites I judged as sketchy. I listened to podcasts and watched videos on the subject. I searched and posted on social news aggregation sites, trading messages with a whole host of individuals from diverse backgrounds. It was too much. Information overload. No one had a solution or an answer, and I was just adding to the already cluttered paths of logic in my mind.

I thought about going to see someone, whether it was a psychiatrist or a physicist, but I couldn’t convince myself to give up the anonymity I had online.

Taking a break, I went out for a run, letting my mind work out and categorize all the information spilling into the seams.

In my freshman year dorm, the community bathroom had two rows of sinks, sitting opposite of one another with mirrors on either wall. As you stood there, looking into the mirror, it created an endless series of reflections. The effect was mesmerizing, especially with whatever stupor or hangover one was experiencing from the night before. There would be plenty of mornings where I’d stand there, brushing my teeth and watch my reflections do the same, moving in unison. If I concentrated hard enough, I could see the motion of each image nudging the next. For the most part, that observation was a figment of my perceived reality. I couldn’t actually see the ripple effect going from one reflection to the other, but I had listened enough to pass a mandatory science class to know that our perception—what we see—is actually the past. This is because light has a finite speed. Whether it’s the light from stars several light-years away or the light from the sun, what we see has to travel to us. If you’re sitting across the table and your dinner companion spills a dab of ketchup on their shirt, you’re still seeing that in the past. Granted, it’s a billionth of a second in the past, but it’s still the past. The moon, for example, is just over one light second away, so when we look at the surface of the moon in the night sky, it is a view that is just over one second old.

During that mandatory science class, the professor lectured one day on the Big Bang and how it wasn’t a singular event, but one that we are still experiencing. He handed out printouts of photos from the Hubble telescope of distant supernovae. The photos were taken over a period of time and the exercise was measuring the photos to demonstrate how the universe was still expanding. For a long time, cosmologists had thought that the universe would one day stop expanding, but found, through the use of this giant telescope, that the universe’s expansion was still accelerating without any signs of stopping. The most amazing piece of this discovery was that the universe started expanding long before the Earth was formed, but that’s all relative to the overall age of the universe. Within that context, combined with the reality that the universe is still expanding, the fact that Earth formed and was followed by millions and billions of years of physical and cognitive evolution, it’s mind-boggling to think of what’s to come with the expansion of the universe over the next billion or so years. Will there be a point where there will be no mysteries of the universe, and the God of the Gaps will disappear into the annals of history?

When I was a child there was some syndicated television show (I don’t remember the name) that attempted to display some sort of spacetime paradox. In the two-dimensional animated short, there were a pair of twins. One of the twins boarded a spaceship that left Earth for a nearby star system. To the twin left of Earth, the mission would take 10 years in Earth time, but to the astronaut, because of the speed in which they were traveling, the round trip would only take six years.

What would have happened if the space twin continued traveling until he reached the far edges of the expanded universe? Looking backwards and seeing the light from the distant stars and planets of our solar system, would he see past, present, and future all lined up, stretching into infinity? Would his journey be infinite? Could he travel on and on without reaching the end, or just like Sir Francis Drake navigating the Earth, would he eventually reach Earth again and again and again? What if our perception of the universe being infinite is wrong, and that it is actually finite? Would he reach the end and see that the universe is moving future to past instead of our perceived notion of time: past to future?

If the universe is finite, does that make the whole notion of the spacetime continuum void? Would that make the universe timeless as well? Is time an illusion? Made up to explain the passing of seasons or the rotation of the Earth around the sun because, as humans, we’re hardwired to experience it that way because of our biological, neurological and philosophical makeup? If time is relative to the observer, as fallible as humankind is in other arenas, could we be wrong about the idea of time? If there is no time and there never was and never will be, does that mean that only the present exists? Are we living through just a series of Nows that are coexisting throughout creation; everything existing at once completely and absolutely without time?

The only evidence I have of seeing myself, Veronica or Eleanor is my memory; a structure of neurons and synapses firing in my brain in this Now. Those memories and the other memories of Veronica throughout the years are just records, stored in my brain, and I’m only able to experience them in the Now. There is no time or place where she still exists. The lunch I ate a few hours ago is still not being eaten. This point in time is all that exists. The future doesn’t exist, nor the past. Any actions in the past were done in the Now and any actions in the future will be done in the Now, as well.

None of this can be explained in ways that my mind can cognitively understand. The mind by its nature functions on the basic understanding that reality consists of things that can be broken down and explained in a linear fashion. Even as I think this, I know this is flawed, because my understanding is limited and linear, but the universe isn’t linear. For all I know, the distinction between past, present and future is only a persistent illusion. What if part of that illusion was that the past, present and future didn’t exist on separate timelines, but coexisted together, all at once, in the Now. Could time, in its past, present and future forms, be folded on top of each other, like a piece of paper folded into three even panels, and humankind’s experience with ghosts are just the encounters with bodies from another time coexisting alongside us? Does this also explain alien encounters? Could we also be experiencing the distant future where traveling at the speed of light and living in the far reaches of the cosmos has evolved humankind into these superorganisms with elongated skulls and a propensity for probing?

When I was a child, for a short period, my parents and I lived in a rural part of the state. Most of our neighborhood was covered in trees, each house spread across a few acres and carving a swath between each was a relatively dense forest with a creek running through it.

When it would rain, myself and a few neighbors around the same age would run north, following the creek, clutching paper plates. The creek would swell during big enough storms, changing course and flow. Over a safe embankment, we’d lean over the churning, swirling water and drop our plates. The current would catch them and we’d follow them down the creek, running through the tall grass, dodging trees and bushes, along a small dirt single-track our feet had carved, down, down till it reached a tunnel going underneath the road. There the plates would be sucked into the vortex. The winner would hoot and holler and then we’d divide and walk back to our houses, wet and occasionally cold.

It was always interesting watching how the storms would shape the forest. During the larger storms the creek would crest the embankment and spread 20 to 30 feet. The next day you could walk through the forest and see the path the creek had made by the flattened grass and the upturned trees.

There’d be times where we’d find new ecosystems forming in the woods after a rain. One I remember, started as a small puddle after a storm; only an inch deep, maybe two feet in diameter. Normally it would have been an easy victim for a good splashing or stomping, but it went untouched. Over time more rain formed it into a larger puddle, then soon a small pond. It was away from the creek, but we’d see minnows and tadpoles over time. On warm days you could lay on the cool ground and watch water bugs skittering across, speculating about where the water-dwelling creatures had come from. How did they get there? Were they pushed there by a storm? Did they evolve there from the micro-beings that were in the water to begin with?

It was easy to see the passage of time within the forest. You’d see it during rainy years with the creation of these curious ecosystems, and in the drier years when the creek would recede and we discovered an old limestone road buried in the creek bed.

I used to think that my parents aged slowly, partly because I used to see them every day, but when I moved out and seeing them every day turned to three or four times a year, I saw the passage of age more clearly. Flipping through the library of photos and videos on my phone, I can see how quickly Eleanor grew while Veronica deteriorated.

If the past doesn’t exist or if it’s coexisting alongside this present, what does that mean for Veronica’s experiences, my experiences, or even Eleanor’s? What does all this mean for the memory of Veronica? If time doesn’t exist, are we all just coexisting together forever in our varying experiences of the Now, and somewhere across the cosmos a past Veronica is still present?