Recursion

by Blake Crouch

It smelled like the ocean and sunscreen and the funnel cakes someone was selling behind us on the boardwalk.” Tears running down his face now. “I have never felt such love in my entire life.

Each day is a revelation, every moment a gift. The simple act of sitting across the dinner table from his daughter and listening to her talk about her day feels like a pardon. How could he ever have taken even one second of it for granted?

“I’ll be in that Portland bar in October of 1990, waiting for you.” “You won’t even recognize me.” “My soul knows your soul. In any time.”

A thousand small moments, but enough to have made life worth living.

Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.