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he first time my life unhappened was Beth Richmond. I was fourteen. She was fifteen. There was a kiss involved. It wasn’t a particularly noteworthy kiss, just one of those high school kisses that are more about learning how to feel than actually feeling. I doubt it would have led to anything like a relationship, even the ephemeral kind so common to that age. Still, a kiss is a kiss, and it was memorable enough.
She didn’t show up for school the next day. I was either too nervous—or too immature—to call her. It wouldn’t have mattered. She didn’t show the day after that either. As casually as I could, I asked around to see if she was sick.
No one had any idea who she was.
Understand, this wasn’t a girl who showed up one day and then disappeared. I had known Beth since sixth grade. Most of my friends knew her too, so I was troubled by how they reacted to my inquiries. They began with polite confusion, and then rapidly degenerated to cruel jokes about my imaginary girlfriend. Over the next few days, I learned that none of my teachers had ever heard of her, and there was no record of her ever having been enrolled at my school. While the fruity taste of her lip gloss was still fresh in my mind, not a single other person had any memory of her at all. Torn between my need to understand what had happened, and my need not to be seen as insane, I quietly let it drop.
I think that was the first time my life unhappened. In truth, it’s only the earliest example of which I am certain. It may have unhappened any number of times before that, in ways too subtle for me to perceive, or at times when I would have been too young to understand. Of the two people who would be able to tell me about earlier examples I may have missed, one has retroactively ceased to exist, and the other has yet to be born. That’s not to say I don’t see them from time to time anyway, but neither of them are speaking to me lately.
I want to say what happened to Beth Richmond was the first step on my path to becoming an applied hyperphysicist, and that it inspired my work with time travel, but that probably represents a causality loop. Regardless, that was the day I first became aware of the non-deterministic nature of the universe, and that the past is every bit as flexible as the future.
More to the point, that was the day I realized no one was aware of it but me.
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