So here’s the strange part, and it’s been the strangest day of my life — which, after the week I’ve had, is saying something.
I went to work. That’s it. That’s the whole astonishing event. After two dead worlds and a stint as a creature you photograph badly in the woods, I got up, I made the coffee, I rinsed the cup — the cup again, always the cup — and I rode the 8:14 in to a job I’ve had for nine years. And I want to tell you what it’s like to do an ordinary Monday with the curtain up.
It’s like being the only person at a party who’s met everyone there before.
Because the faces are the same. Not literally — different noses, different centuries — but the people behind them, the particular shapes of the souls, those I know. The material warned me, in its dry little way, back when I read that karma is just inertia: it said the ones you’ve got unfinished business with tend to come back around you. Same cast, new costumes. I read that two weeks ago and thought it was a tidy idea. Now I’m standing on a train platform recognizing people I haven’t seen since a planet that no longer exists.
The woman at the next desk, who I’ve always, for no reason I could give you, trusted with my life — I knew her in the gold. I’m certain of it. We were something good to each other in a place where everything was good. And my boss — the one who makes my teeth itch, who I can’t share a room with — him I knew on Maldek, on the other side of it, when there were sides. And the kid who does the coffee run, who I’ve barely registered in nine years — I owe that kid something so old and so large that when he handed me my cup this morning I had to turn away so he wouldn’t see my face.
They don’t know. That’s what I can’t get past. Not one of them knows. They’re just living their Monday, the way I was a week ago, while I stand in the middle of the office with all of time switched on, looking at a room full of people I’ve loved and failed and fought across the dead worlds — all of us washed up together on the same blue shore, handed one more go.
The wheel the material talked about. I’m standing in the middle of it. And for the first time I’m wondering whether I’m the one who’s meant to stop it.