It deeply unsettled me. I had always been a man of fact. Of evidence. I believed in things I could see with my own eyes and touch with my own hands and very little else. I didn’t have a great imagination. I wasn’t good at philosophizing. Religion had never interested me.
I was good at reading numbers and trends and data and extrapolating that data to make wise financial decisions, and that was about it.
But there I was, faced with what I saw as very real evidence that the things I could see with my own eyes, the things I could touch with my own hands, were not real at all. Nothing about my own perceptions could be trusted.
I tried to focus on the screen to escape my overwhelming thoughts.
In a weird way, it was like I was experiencing the warped nature of time myself. Hours passed on the screen. I heard every word spoken byboth myself and Joey. I watched it in real time—hourspassing—but it felt like only minutes.
Eventually, my caseworker hit a button on their keyboard and paused the image.
“This is your moment.”
I blinked, the last words of my on-screen self’s conversation with Joey ringing in my ears. They were at a restaurant discussing what they would do in a hypothetical situation where they died and got the chance to relive their lives.
Not hypothetical at all.
My caseworker looked up at me, and I nodded.
“This is your choice?” they asked.
“Sheis my choice.”
And then, in the blink of an eye, I found myself in new surroundings.
Joey sat across from me, a beautiful miracle. She took my breath away.
I stood up, pushed my chair in, pulled out the one next to Joey, and slid it as close to her as I dared. I was scared to touch her, scared to touchanything, for fear that I would wake up to find this reality had crumbled away into nothingness. I still wasn’t convinced this was real. Surely, I would wake up any moment in a hospital bed gasping for air or in hell begging for forgiveness.
Hope could be a kind of torture—but the absence of it, I knew, was far worse.
It didn’t matter.
In that moment, she was the only thing that mattered.
I took her hand in mine, looked her in the eye, and said, knowing I meant every word, “If I had a chance to do things over, I would want to be as close to you as possible.”
27
Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming
What do you mean, since the beginning?”
My voice is shaky. Mybodyis shaky. I feel like I might pass out. Just when I was finally adjusting to my new normal, the rug has been pulled out from under me.
“Dinner. Lobster and steak. You asked me what I would do if I died and got a second chance. Right there, right then. I was honest. I said I’d want to be as close to you as possible.”
I remember the moment with distinct clarity. I had found the words sweet at the time. I thought everything he did was so sweet.
How many times did I think he seemed different from the Alex I once knew, unmarred by the cynicism and arrogance that would come to him with age?
How stupid was I?
Before I can react, he reaches out, grabs my hand, and moves my index finger away from my thumb cuticle, which I was starting to pick at. Something I haven’t done in months.
“Don’t,” he murmurs.
His quiet seriousness jolts me—I hadn’t realized he even noticed this habit of mine. He never said anything.
