by
Blake Crouch
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There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling red in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead of me.
It's the beautiful thing about youth.
There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.
I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get.
I sit in bed watching the daylight fade over Chicago.
Whatever storm system brought the rain last night has blown out, and in its wake, the sky is clear and the trees have turned and there's a stunning quality to the light as it moves toward evening - polarized and golden - that I can only describe as loss.
Robert Frost's gold that cannot stay.
"Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child. Maybe it doesn't make sense at a surface level, but the subconscious marches to its own beat. [...]"
I find myself moving toward you through the grass, carrying a new glass of wine, and when your eyes avert to mine, it feels like some piece of machinery has just seized in my chest. Like worlds colliding. As I draw near, you take the glass out of my hand as if you had previously sent me off to get it and smile with an easy familiarity, like we've known each other forever. You try to introduce me to Dillon, but the skinny-jeaned artist, now effectively cockblocked, makes his excuses and leaves.
Then it's just the two of us standing in the shade of the hedgerow, and my heart is going like mad. I say, "I'm sorry to interrupt, but it looked like you might need rescuing," [...]
I only remember pieces of what was said in our first moments together. Mainly how you laugh when I tell you I'm an atomic physicist, but not derisively. As if the revelation truly delights you. I remember how the wine had stained your lips. I've always known, on a purely intellctual level, that our separateness and isolation are an illusion. We're all made of the same thing - the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars. I've just never felt hat knowledge in my bones until that moment, there, with you. And it's because of you.
[...] He turns to DAniela. "I got everything I ever wanted, except you. And you haunted me. What we could've been. That's why-"
"Then you should have stayed with me fifteen years ago when you had the chance."
"Then I wouldn't have built the box."
[...]
He says, "Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice."
Daniela says, "Life doesn't work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don't cheat the system."
confronting the other (main) jason