How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

by Charles Yu

She has freed herself from her own box, her own tightly circular mental loop, her cycles of highs and lows, anxiety and mania and delayed grief and depression, and in doing so she has become some kind of bodhisattva, has found the peace that my mother always looked for. She is what I knew was always possible for my mom, if all that light inside her could find its way out.

I called to my father a few times and, not hearing any response, walked down the hall, afraid of what I might find, not hearing a sound, and then, as I approached, I heard a muffled noise, a sound I was certain I had never heard before, and as I peeked in through the mostly closed door of his small office, I saw, for the first time in my life, my father’s eyes red and cheeks and chin wet with tears. He was looking at a picture of my grandfather, the one I never met, who died when I was six months old, who died on a different continent, an ocean away, poor and broken and missing his oldest son. I stood there in the hall, a few feet outside the threshold of my father’s private study, watching him, looking at him framed by the door, while he looked at his own father, framed in the picture, the three of us, son, father, and grandfather, forming a melancholy axis, forming a chain, a regress, a bridge into the past.

Move forward, into the empty plane. Find the book you wrote, and read it until the end, but don’t turn the last page yet, keep stalling, see how long you can keep expanding the infinitely expandable moment. Enjoy the elastic present, which can accommodate as little or as much as you want to put in there. Stretch it out, live inside of it.