"Come on, come on, come on, before the moment's gone"
The lyrics of "No. 1 Party Anthem" by the Arctic Monkeys rang through the summer air. It had been a red hot summer, right from June, covering
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At first, it was wonder.
She could faintly sense the shimmer of other lives brushing against her own, like ripples of an undercurrent beneath still water.
A subtle doubling of perception: she would turn left and feel, just behind her ribs, the ghost of herself turning right. A faint reflection inside an intangible mirror.
The fabric of possibility trailed her every step, as if her passage left a soft wake of light, echoing behind her in glimmering threads.
It was intoxicating. Every heartbeat bloomed outward into infinity. Each moment fluttered, on the verge of refraction. Each outcome drew its first breath, already bright at the edge of becoming.
She could feel them all: the self who stayed, the one who left, the one who fell, the one who forgave.
The world glimmered like a prism turning endlessly in sunlight, and she lived at its centre, radiant with multiplicity.
She called it grace; to live threaded through a plethora of possibilities at once. She walked reverently, as if the air itself were holy with unchosen lives. It felt like standing inside the heart of creation and hearing it beat.
At doorways she would pause, sensing a hundred other versions of herself crossing alongside her in unique unison. One laughing, one grieving, one vanishing into brilliance.
To witness it was enough to make anyone believe in infinity.
But infinity has its own gravity.
The shimmer began to thicken. Light seemed to have acquired weight.
Each possibility clung a little longer before peeling away.
When she extended her arm, she could feel a thousand hands reaching too, their weight dragging against her movement.
The air grew viscous with overlap.
The boundaries between her lives blurred.
At night, she dreamed in myriads. Scenes from a million possible yesterdays bleeding together; a lover's voice spliced across languages, a child's cry from a distant version of dawn, a mother's lullaby echoing from a world before memory.
She would wake in a sweat, surrounded by the residue of unchosen mornings, the afterimage of light on closed eyes.
She blamed exhaustion.
But soon, she began to notice that the light itself had slowed. The angles of her room no longer aligned perfectly. Time arrived late, heavy with indecision.
Infinity began to ache.
Perhaps her body was not meant to bear such abundance.
Every possibility demanded its share of presence. Every unlived life pressed inward, asking to be real. She could feel their longing, not cruel but insistent. The dancer's knees bruised in rehearsal. The exile's prayer whispered to an empty sky. The clockmaker's hands stained with oil and years.
They waited, patient but relentless. Until she began to understand: that to keep them all alive was to be crushed beneath their collective tenderness.
The shimmer that had once thrilled her now pulsed like pressure behind her eyes.
Her heart beat in chords instead of rhythm, harmonies piled where a single melody should have been.
Every second contained too much.
She stood within the kaleidoscope of her own potential, the multiverse flickering around her like a cathedral of colour. But symmetry strained; patterns splintered; existence wavered at the edge of its own ubiquity.
And then came stillness — the stillness of realisation.
The realisation that she could not drift forever among infinite mirrors. That to live was to wound possibility. That the cost of being everyone was the loss of being someone.
So she had to choose: between the choir of infinite selves or the silence that would let one voice be heard.
But that moment was terror.
For in the pause before decision, she felt the full ledger of loss open before her.
All the laughter of unlived childhoods, the faces of lovers she would never meet, the art that would remain unborn, the quiet evenings in unseen cities, the voices that would never call her name.
Every possible tenderness that had ever existed in the margins of her might-be life shimmered before her like glass about to fracture.
She felt the infinity of her own potential watching her, knowing that once she chose, they would cease to exist. Yet, they did not beg. They simply looked back, luminous and wordless, as if asking whether she was certain.
And she wasn't.
For one agonizing instant, she was suspended in absolute uncertainty, balanced on the edge of meaning itself.
It was not death she feared, but the thought that even death itself might be forgotten.
In her hesitation, she felt the cosmos tilt, waiting for her verdict. Even the stars dimmed, as though shielding their faces from what might come.
But in that trembling, something steadier stirred within her.
It was not certainty. Nor understanding. Nor fear.
It was a pull older than thought. Indescribable yet innate. It was the same pulse that taught atoms to gather, that drove lungs to draw breath, that compelled voice to break into word. An inexplicable current drawing light toward focus.
Somehow, she knew that meaning would not wait for certainty. It would not wait for understanding. It would not wait for fear.
And so, with the weight of infinity, she chose.
The compression was immediate.
It was not a fading, but a convergence.
Every universe convulsed and folded inward. Galaxies cascaded through her like reversed explosions; all timelines folded like wings returning to the body. Light found its axis.
The uncountable selves of her existence surged toward her in silent devotion. The dancer, the scholar, the mother, the exile – all of them collapsing into her chest in one incandescent instant.
The world steadied. Time exhaled. Space remembered its edges.
She stood at its centre, as every possible heartbeat aligned with her own.
The kaleidoscope sealed. The hum ceased. The infinite was gone.
But she remained.
Her breath felt heavier now, but truer. The sky seemed smaller, but more intimate. Each inhalation bound her more tightly to this one life. This irrevocable strand of reality.
And for the first time, she felt the exquisite ache of being singular.
No chorus of echoes, no shimmer of alternatives. Only the dense, radiant weight of presence.
The others were gone, but not lost. They lived within her, compressed into the marrow of her existence. Their pasts coursed through her veins; their futures transfigured into gravity.
As the silence deepened, she realised that her impossible singularity was not the end of freedom, but its consecration – the shimmer now a beam, the radiance now a focus, the many now a one.
She smiled. A single smile.
Because she had wagered infinity for meaning. And she had won.