Iteration

I woke up on the beach and immediately held my hand up against the invasive sun. Everything around me was the same as the last time I looked.

A cloud of familiarity hung over every experience as I imagined myself returning to this place in world after world, each time playing out exactly like the last one, including my very own stream of thoughts. There was never a version of me that behaved in any other way. I knew this because I was the very person who discovered the count.
Since photons travel at the speed of light, the entire universe unfolds in front of them within a singular moment. A cosmic blip. Each time the whole thing starts and then it ends, and all of our lives occur within the space between those two verbs. I found a way to measure a property of photons, not what you'd normally call a lifespan, but the amount of times it blipped. Each one of them. The test was so simple it could be performed anywhere, if anyone other than me knew about it. I hoped no one ever would. I assumed sooner or later someone else would make the same discovery and not be a coward about it the way that I had been. I just didn't want to be that person.
Everything would always unfold like this. I knew there was no other way for it to happen because otherwise the photons would not give a readout bigger than 1. What a ridiculous number. There had never been that few of anything.
I knew my discovery should have pushed me towards a more meaningful life, considering that whatever happened would happen every time I was here. But this knowledge seemed to destroy any kind of will I might have had. There was nothing but the number, always present, a mocking reminder of something truly inescapable, that is existence itself. Day after day passed and I failed to put myself together and create any semblance of an organized way of being. I knew that nothing I did would disrupt the holy balance.
There were still ways to keep faith, of course. I heard about some kind of religious group who embraced the discoveries of carbon dating which suggested the universe was much older than previously thought. They just said it was intentionally done by God. He made it seem older on purpose. I found the idea interesting and a bit funny, but I could never get behind it myself.
I remembered visiting this beach quite a lot as a kid and then we moved to another city. I drove here today just to lie down on the cold grey sand, close my eyes, listen to the gentle hush of the waves and then open my eyes and pretend that this is the start of the loop. At this point you could call it a ritual or a tradition. I knew I had done it many times before. This was my start.

There was another girl at the beach, sitting there on a blanket with her arms wrapped around her legs, looking out to sea. I walked up to her.
"Hey there," I said.
"Hello," she replied, looking up. "Here for the sunset?"
"Not exactly. But at this point I might as well stick around, if that's okay."
"Sure."
"Do you come here a lot?"
"Not really. Though I don't live that far away. I think sometimes it's harder to visit a place if it's really close to you."
I nodded as I watched the skies. The red ink of the sun had spilled all around it and a white pillar of light skipped across the waves to meet us. My breath sped up as I forcefully closed my eyes in an attempt to escape it for just a moment.
"Is everything okay?" she asked, patting me on the back. "To me it's really quite beautiful."
"Yes," I said. I opened my eyes and tried as hard as I could to see it from her point of view, to find something worthwhile, a thing I could appreciate despite everything else, because shouldn't beautiful things do that to you? Make you ignore the rest? Nothing else should matter. There was nothing but the everlasting light. It beamed through the void and invited me to forget the past and the future. They would always remain there. No sunset could ever be the final one, but the spectacle sure made it seem that way. Once again it managed to fool me along with everyone else. For just a second it all seemed truly unique and I couldn't help but make a gentle smile and, oh god, the words left my mouth before I even realized.
"How often do you get to see something like this?"

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Pub: 02 Mar 2025 15:45 UTC

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