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It was hard to keep up the bullshit facade of industriousness when she felt entirely dead inside.
desultory
Or maybe she should blame it on February. The shortest month, and objectively the worst.
I thought you wanted to be friends.” Had she said that? Probably. That’s what you were supposed to say when you ended a relationship with someone you couldn’t hate, but didn’t know how to love, either.
“Seriously?” Jules said. They sighed with melodramatic disappointment. “We find a wrinkle in time and you tell the manager?”
She’d only gotten through the latter by focusing on her and Jules’s plans to get obliteratingly drunk afterward.
Ava had admired their courage at first, but she eventually recognized it as yet another way of shutting people out before they could hurt you.
It was the most obnoxiously heterosexual thing Ava had seen since the last St. Patrick’s Day parade.
“This video is making me gayer out of spite,” Jules muttered, clear even from the other side of the room.
She knew she was acting like a royal bitch, but she was still so angry at Tricia, at her corporate overlords, and at the universe—sorry, the multiverse—in general.
The heart was a stupid, hurting animal, and her heart was stupider than most.
Ava had never really had to deal with an emergency; just the slow disaster that was her life.
The truth was she cared too much, about everything, but Jules most of all. She couldn’t stop caring, she felt like she was choking on how much everything mattered so much. It froze her, or burned her up inside, or sometimes both at the same time in an impossibly cruel alchemy. She’d been diagnosed with depression and anxiety, but really, all it seemed to come down to was this: she cared too much, too often, and it left her oversensitized and insufferable.
Why had she yelled at them? Why had she made them think they needed to save her? That it was Jules’s fault they were both in this predicament? Why couldn’t either of them move beyond the same, stupid patterns of behavior?
She’d lived with fear and anxiety for so long, and fell into fits of dread and despair over the smallest things. Going to work. Making a dentist appointment. Grocery shopping. The light right after the sun went down, when she realized she’d accomplished almost nothing that day. All normal things that normal people could deal with, and she was never equal to the challenge of them. Catastrophe seemed to lurk around every corner, and she felt constantly out of control.
“Infinite iterations,”
Existence isn’t a gift, it’s a right, Jules had replied. But having to reclaim it every day makes life easier to appreciate, maybe.
Much as “Ugh, capitalism” was a running joke between them, their system was too big to do anything but joke about it. It’s not like they had a plethora of options waiting for them out there.
“Getting lost for lack of a better option loses its appeal after a while. I’ve already got too much free time for comfort.
“It’s an old sadness,” Nouresh said. “Doesn’t heal, but you get used to bearing it.”
“Every world has its monsters. I’ve been watching the news, and yours is no exception.
They were Schrödinger’s Cat at this point, alive and dead and all points in between until Ava made a choice to find out.
“It showed me that there were infinite possibilities, at all times. After I made captain of the Anahita, I worried over every decision, doubted whether I was brave or smart or strong enough to pull my mission off and protect my crew. I could remind myself that somewhere in the multiverse of possibility, there existed a world where I was all of those things. Maybe it was the world that I already lived in.”
Anywhere that gets you disoriented enough so that the walls between universes are not so firm can hide a marejii.”
“Now the way I see it,” she said, “there are infinite universes where Jules died. And infinite universes where they’re alive. Similarly, there are worlds where you are too much of a coward to find out, and worlds where you are brave enough. So. It’s up to you: which of those worlds do we exist in right now?”
To go where she wanted, she had to get lost, and it seemed almost instinctual to do that now. She’d been lost for a long time, rudderless.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s work opened a lot of doorways in my imagination, and she reminded us all that the paradigms of power are neither inescapable nor omnipotent. We can imagine better alternatives.
