Nodes
Fiction. January 4, 2014.
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There once was a girl who went through her life making decisions.
Each of those decisions she made - where to go to school, whether to have an ice cream cone, whether to get married, whether to turn a corner, change plans for the night, talk to a stranger - some mundane choices, some silly, some urgent, some grave - each of these choices became a node, a point in time at which, through having made a decision, her life course changed forever.
At each of those nodes, each of those discrete points in time, there were infinitely many possible decisions she could have made.
But she chose one.
Other versions of herself in parallel universes, in worlds that look vaguely similar to her own, chose courses split from hers by only one or two or twenty or fifty or a billion decisions.
When her mind drifts, as it often does, she daydreams about what their lives, the lives of these other girls vaguely like her in other worlds vaguely like her own, must be like after having made one small decision differently that rippled out in effect into an entire lifetime of other possible, or seemingly impossible, decisions.
When her mind drifts, as it often does, she hopes that most of those girls are happy.
When her mind drifts, as it often does, she thinks she knows for certain that a few of them are miserable.
Looking back, she believes she chose the best possible course of action given the information available to her at the time.
When her mind drifts, as it often does, she daydreams about sending herself a letter, an operations manual for the future, sent back to a specific point in time, at a specific place, where this message from the future would have had the most impact.
This message, it is crafted to force the hand of her former self, crafted to make her younger counterpart stay the course she initially had chosen.
It is a dire message she always thought she would relay at all costs.
This one thing, it becomes a totem, a security blanket, a locket, a mission.
Up until one point.
Up until one point, she would say this would have been the best course of action, the best decision she could have possibly made.
Up until one point, one discrete moment in time, going back, handing over the letter, pushing the reset button - this seems like the best and only choice that could be made.
But one solitary random event that happened not too terribly long ago, she has decided that it has to happen.
This one event happened under such precariously interwoven fleeting circumstances that it could not have happened any other way.
No matter how many ways she goes over this in her head, no matter how many times she spins the information, contorts it, tries to solve it like a massive Rubik's cube, this one event hinges upon all the other events up until that point remaining intact in their places in time.
The reality she now knows is only that she would fight viciously to keep this one solitary incident intact, even at the expense of delivering the letter and pushing the reset button.
Now that she finds the thought of the loss of this key incident unbearable, her view has shifted.
She is suddenly, both selfishly and altruistically, able to see the fact that the delivery of the letter would irreparably alter the lives of her doubles in impossibly many parallel universes, and thus the course of history itself, across dimensions.
Every version of herself, past that chosen delivery point in time, would be in possession of the letter.
She would like to think that some of her doubles would choose to look and others might say no and put the letter away.
She would like to think that some would read it and choose to believe it, while others might think it a hoax.
But she knows that all versions of herself would be too curious to resist.
She knows all versions of herself would follow the instructions down to the very letter.
Feeling that she now has no other choice, she chooses a course of action meant to circumvent this crisis of conscience she believes her future self would need to endure in order to prevent herself from taking advantage of the opportunity to reset time.
She burns the letter just in case she would ever, in this life, find a time machine.
Still, she waits.
She has to assume there exists another girl in some other dimension who feels no allegiance to her own course of events.
She has to assume there is another version of herself in an alternate universe who has no change of heart, no singular precarious moment to protect.
She has to assume there is another version of herself who chooses to deliver the letter.
The only reason she is still here is because her double has not yet found a time machine.
Don't spoil it for me but the girl is really an alternate universe version of Coleman or Phisto isn't it!
In all seriousness though, this was quite good I like how much thought you put into it, and how our decisions could have such an impact on our futures. Your wisdom really shined through in this article Demi.
Wow, this was haunting and beautiful. It’s interesting to think about how just one little choice could change the whole course of your life…or someone else’s.