You meet the You Who Said Yes in front of a pretzel-dog stand in the run-down mall near your house. Usually she brims with effervescence, a joy that sparkles out of every pore the way bubbles fizzle and pop from glasses of that expensive champagne you all like. It’s difficult seeing your face so full of hope, but she has the right to be happy. She’s the one who said yes, after all.
Today, sadness draws the corners of her mouth. Her eyelids flutter with tears waiting to be spilled. Her face twists the way yours does when you’re hiding a panic attack. You know what it means before she even speaks. Dee’s not doing well. The expression on her face, your face, wraps its fingers around your heart. You know that expression, the feeling of hopelessness and despair. It’s your everyday reality.
What if this time … Her eyes, which are your eyes, are fixed and glassy. Tears trickle down her cheeks.
You can’t think that way, you admonish, even as your stomach twists. What if this time, the thing you are all dreading actually happens?
You sit solemnly together, waiting for the yous you know to arrive, watching the yous you don’t go about their shopping. Your echoes mingle among the regular shoppers. Two of you giggle over a shared milkshake. One wears her hair in pigtails, one in a short bob. One has raw-looking scars poking out under from her yellow halter top. The other wears dungarees over a bright anime T-shirt. There are endless differences, yet they are the same. The way you and the You Who Said Yes are the same.
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Near the epicentre, people have hundreds of alternates. Thousands. By the time news leaked out about the demise of an illegal hadron collider, the collapse of the wavefunction couldn’t be contained. The doppelgangers are alternative realities spilling from a crack in space-time, expanding outwards. This merged reality was only ever one large-scale, quantum decoherence event away. But you see only your own echoes. You’ve grown used to a world of people talking to their invisible selves.
One thing you learnt from the event is that you enjoy being with yourselves. It’s easy to be with people who know the unspoken rules, the little boundaries and quirks. For other people, the situation has taken a darker turn. There have been murders, doppelgangicides, which is wild if you think about it.
No one knows the timeline until reality contracts and condenses back into a single stream. Your own sense of purpose condensed into a single reality the moment you met the You Who Said Yes. She’s like looking into the very best parts of yourself. Because you’ve wondered, all these years, crying yourself to sleep. What would things have been like? Now you know, you aren’t about to let go. The You Who Said Yes is not you. You know she’s not. But you can’t help feeling her life is somehow your life. In saving her happiness, maybe you are saving it for yourself.
Every version of you you’ve met has united with the same purpose, because you’ve yet to find another who said yes. She might be a singularity. That’s the unspoken premise you’re all working from. In all the universes, maybe only one of you ever said yes. What if she was the only one who leapt at the chance of happiness? You’ll be damned if you let this single lucky self lose that. You all feel the same because you’re all fighting the darkness within yourselves. Every time you meet, there are fewer of you.
When Dee proposed, you were caught off guard. Your anxieties got the better of you. You would have said yes, in time. Of course you would. The very next day, probably. You just needed one night alone to think. You wanted more time when that’s exactly what you didn’t have. The You Who Said Yes never hesitated.
The night you said I need more time, Dee died. You knew she was fragile; the darkness inside was what drew you together, but you thought she understood that you loved her. If only you had agreed without hesitation. Now death is chasing Dee across the one reality where you said yes. Like some sort of deadly regression towards the mean, distant realities are collapsing in favour of the most common, the one without Dee.
You should have been a life coach, someone to help her see how much she matters. How much you all matter. What if death collapses inwards like a waveform across all realities? What if Dee can’t escape the inertia of all your shared indecisiveness?
The You Who Understands Medicine arrives with Experimental Pharmacist You. The You From The Yoga Retreat produces her healing crystals. Your own mechanical experience is not needed — you’ve already fitted safety devices in Dee’s home.
The You Who Said Yes squeezes your hand. She shows you photos. You and Dee, living a life of possibilities. She’s a terminal-care worker, perhaps that gave her a better perspective on the fragility of time. She knew not to waste a day when the rest of you were too scared.
You cluster to look at the photos, nodding at each other the way only you can. You will save Dee as many times as it takes to preserve this one reality, this one shining timeline, this single snapshot of your other, better, life.
Sometimes one life takes every part of you, and it’s worth every ounce of strength and heartache because you need to know. You all need to know, that somewhere out there, in one singular, perfect reality, one of you is happy.
