The Time Traveler Finally Falls in Love by T.S. Leonard

The Time Traveler Finally Falls in Love
by T.S. Leonard

and it ends, of course, in fabulous heartbreak, like anything—
it’s not an if, but when—so the trick is learning how to bend
the days you get: nailing our flowers to the wall, reading
side by side; memorize his body curving like a question
mark, asking, can we stay like this forever? We can.
We travel to his boyhood home; to ancient Rome; to
my twenties where we laugh at what I thought was real
love; we see art in every century. We grow old together
at different times. We rebuild our ship from scraps
of former relationships—debris of who we have
been or seen, blueprints for our future past. We host
our friends for cocktail hours. We sign a lease on a house.
I meet his friends, and through them, I love him more. I take
him to his first drag show. He talks us through our first fight;
we have the same fight again. We kiss on corners just because
we have fought hard for it. We make up words for this. I say,
I have never been in love. I ask, how will I know what’s next?
He takes my hand. He takes me home. We meet, as strangers,
on a blank morning, and he says he doesn’t have much time.
Instantly, I recognize this man. I’ve been waiting here for him.

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I’ve always found time traveling stories particularly heartbreaking since I first saw the Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour movie, “Somewhere in Time”. The first lines of this are just so truthy, that we are all time travelers in our way in the way that we hold memory and experience, and sometimes things begin with deep recognition, this idea that sometimes we meet again someone we have already lived with in some other order of time. All that to say, this poem stirs something in me.

This poem appeared in Poetry in 2026 and Leonard is very much a contemporary voice.

T.S. Leonard, "The Time Traveler Finally Falls in Love," Poetry (January/February 2025).