you, in reverse (micro-fiction) in life stuff and misc.

You wake up with the knowledge that you died yesterday and yet here you are now, waking up more or less safe in your bed.

You wake up knowing that this is not the first time this has happened. You wake up knowing that this has happened to you dozens of times in your life, at least enough times where you have lost count but at minimum thirty or forty.

You wake up with the knowledge that yesterday you died and here you are alive again, again, no one else remembering that you died or any of the events that led up to your death. You yourself have always remembered the death and the cause yet never quite as though those things actually happened to you, more as though it was a film or teevee show you’d once seen.

You remember as though it were perhaps a story you made up and then repeated under your breath so often that you remembered it as if it were real. You remember all of it but it has no longer happened and here you are, waking up the next day alive, oh alive. Cockles and mussels, cockles and mussels, alive oh alive.

Maybe you were hit by a car this time, as happened in college. Maybe you died of lung cancer after a long painful illness, a life you remember ending a couple of years back. Maybe you were killed by a jealous ex-lover, maybe you were on a plane that got hijacked and flown into the side of a mountain. All these things have happened to you but then the next day, you were alive again and no one else remembered any of it happening. At least not to you.

The plane still flew into the mountain and everyone died, it’s just that now you never got on it. For some reason, history rewrote itself and you weren’t a part of it, you had made some other safer decision. You never had gotten that ticket, you’d never had the reason to go where that plane was going and now you’re alive in a world where you hadn’t done that. Maybe a world, maybe a timeline or a plane or dimension, you’re not really sure how it works. You just know this is what happens.

You are, and waking up once again in a safe bed reminded of this, a peculiar kind of immortal. You are quantum immortal. You don’t know how this happened to you, maybe it is like this for everyone ever and you just remember it or admit to remembering it, but as far as you know, it has always been like this for you.

You are quantum immortal. You can die, of course, but you always wake up alive in a new scenario where you’d never made the choices and risks that made you die the last time. You remember the old life as if a tale but no one else does. Every time you tried to tell someone how all this happened, you were treated as crazy or kidding, sent to a guidance counselor or a shrink or a priest and eventually you gave up on trying to tell anyone how you feel.

Maybe everyone feels like this, maybe this happens to everyone but everyone always acted like you were delusional for believing this so you stopped saying it out loud and just learned to try and accept it.

You are quantum immortal. You imagine you will have to eventually die and stay dead, maybe, of extreme old age someday, of whatever the natural limit of living is for homo sapiens but you’re a long way off from that for at least now.

The problem is not so much the fear of outliving all of your loved ones, like in a vampire tale or a Highlander film, though you suppose that would probably be quite unpleasant too. The problem is that every time you avoid this death or that, all of the choices and risks that lead up to that death are erased and rewritten too. You live on but everything that led up to that death is now no longer real, is now just a hazy memory no one else in the whole world believes.

When you were no longer killed by that crazy ex, you had no longer dated her at all. The first kiss, the awkward fumbling when you first had sex, all of those things no longer happened, all the great things you had with her are all gone now too. All the good washed away with the bad to keep you quantum alive.

To erase that long terrible death by lung cancer, everything was rebooted back to the first smoke, all the friends you ever met out smoking together are gone, that band you formed is gone, the loves you met are gone, all of it never happened.

All the grand adventures you had in your life that put you in position to take that flight that was hijacked are gone now too. Your summer in Morocco, your two weeks in Belize, that wild layover in Tehran, that adventurous history of your life is wiped away because they would have led to you dying that day. All those chunks of you are gone.

You wake up again and you remember that you are quantum immortal. You wake up alive knowing that you just paid the price of whole vibrant pieces of your life to keep coming back. Every time you die and then don’t, there is another risk untaken, another chance unexplored, another piece of your life rendered boring, routine, dull and… well… lifeless.

Every time you come back to life, your past is a little more lifeless except for those phantom limb aches of a life that you actually lived and then didn’t because it would have led to you dying.

You wake up in bed and you turn out not to be bed. It will go on like this forever until there is no possibility, no scenario where there isn’t a risk that could’ve been erased to let you keep on living.

Maybe someday you will wake up and be one-hundred-and-thirty and everyone will be surprised that you are still alive. If you try to tell them about this curse of quantum immortality, they will chalk it all up to senility but they’ll still marvel. They will ask you what your secret was.

You will know what your secret was.

Your secret was, is, will be that you have lived this long because choice-by-choice risk-by-risk bit-by-bit you will have never really lived at all.

You wake up again in your bed, no longer dead, trying to recall which piece of yourself you lost this time in the bargain, wishing you had taken every one of those risks. Wishing you had actually experienced life instead of surviving for so close to forever.

You wake up again. Again and again and again and again and again.

Last updated March 24, 2017