Lying prostrate, in a sealed glass cabinet that stretched the entire left wall of the sterile room, was the man she loved so many years ago.

Choking back a sob, she swept across the tiles as if taking flight, before coming to rest by his side. Tentatively, she raised her hand, hovering it above his enclosure, suddenly unsure what to do next.

“Perhaps you’d like to touch the real thing?” asked the grey haired man with the kindly smile, who appeared at her side. She turned to him, eyes incredulous, asking without speaking, if this could actually be possible?

Ushering her into the next room, she unfurled from her hunched stature, with the heat now seeping back into her bones. And there, basking in the brown hued warmth of his surroundings was her first, and long lost love.

Lounging on a tan recliner, his face lit up with the smile that had waited to be unleashed for a decade. Arms wide, he beckoned her forward.

With a slight, shocked shake of the head she leapt towards him, and lost herself in an oh so familiar embrace.

“How… When…” she stuttered, unable to articulate the right words for such a surreal situation.

“I always was one for the unusual,” he offered with an embarrassed shrug of his shoulders, while inhaling the heady scent of her skin. “They rescued me after the curtains closed”.

He smiled at her then; it was the grin she thought she would never feel on her face again…

“How did I not know until now?”

“My mind’s eye has always followed you, even in the state you just saw me in, in the lab room. But I was told to leave you be. How would you have moved on if you had known?” He kept stroking her arm, as she sat, encircled in his embrace, trying to put the pieces together of this most perplexing puzzle.

“I can’t live a normal life. I only appear out of my sleeping shell for a very small amount of time each day. And there is no possible way for me to survive outside of this room, without any technology.” he explained.

“So… are you alive or dead?” she asked meekly, unsure if she even wanted to hear the answer.

“I didn’t die, I am just frozen in time,” he explained gently, stroking her skin. Suddenly, his eyes began to glisten with tears. “The experiment is almost complete and I have to let go… This is their gift back to me, a chance to say a proper, and final, farewell.” she went to protest but he silenced her with a kiss. “Don’t ever think of me as dead, just frozen in another place and in another time.”