Timepieces

The Loop

If you've talked to me in any personal capacity, you probably know that my favorite TV show is DARK- a very despondent and generally hopeless German sci-fi series which focuses essentially on multigenerational hopelessness. I won't deny that the idea for The Loop appeared only after I watched DARK, but the premise is not the same. And, if anything, I think The Loop is more depressing. Cheers!

How can you have time when it clearly has you?

-Jonas Kahnwald, DARK

With a tiny difference in the state of the early universe, none of us would exist. Every event in the past, however small, is essential to the development of the present and future. Cause and effect, hateful as it is, is responsible for the existence of everything we see around us today.

I don't remember the first time someone explained it all to me, but I must have been young enough that belief came easily. Today, I wake up every morning to the truth, crashing down on me in an immutable wave. Outside, masses of people clad in their dirty immortal rags scream to the heavens that the world is a lie. I pity them, really, those who refuse to believe. I can understand why clinging to untruth brings them through every day. I who have accepted the bare-faced truth am thus compelled to live with the reality of an endless cycle of suffering. Those who believe that the world is a lie are those who refuse to admit that the world is a loop.

I slip my necklace through my fingertips, letting the chain slither ever onward in a perpetual cycle. If I deviate even minutely from what my predecessors have seen, I am in danger of destroying everything. Destroying myself and everyone I know and creating an entirely new set of people in danger of making the same mistake. Sometimes I ask myself: is it I who deserve to exist, or is it the others who have no opportunity because of my selfishness?

I press three fingers against the edge of the bedspread and rise from the narrow cot, my bare feet striking the floor without a sound. With care, so as not to wake others in the building, I ease the door open and step into the hall.

Standing at the bottom of the staircase is my mother.

My mother and her parents died last month. The bridge fell to pieces underneath their car and sank into the river. I knew it was going to happen, but I did nothing. After the funeral, a meager affair in which my mother and her parents were presented with their own ashes, I offered to take her in. Her parents, reminded of the brevity of life, departed on a long vacation to somewhere tropical and equally bleak. The ashes were returned to the river- which I'm sure my mother would have appreciated- and she consented after considerable debate to stay in the building with me.

She's younger and happier than anyone else in the building, and it's a joy to have her here. But it also makes me feel guilty once again. I know that over the course of the next few weeks, she'll become weaker and weaker, to the point where she'll lose the use of her legs. She'll seek a specialist's help, and all the specialist will be able to tell her is that she will never walk again. I again know exactly what will happen, but I'll do nothing about it. When she meets the specialist's father, staying in the clinic in a similar capacity, she'll never forget his face. When they're both young adults, they'll marry. Hence me.

I have no control over the situation. Much as I hate my mother's future disability, just as I hate most everything in life, I need to live with it or die with it. And like so many of the others here, I choose to live. A holdover lingers from the days before the loop; death in the face of adversity is still a cowardly escape, not a noble one. And any one death would create a chain reaction that would kill countless others. It's more than just cowardly- it's selfish. This argument saves my life every day.