Unhappenings
Authors: Edward Aubry
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he first time my life unhappened was Beth Richmond. I was fourteen. She was fifteen. There was a kiss involved. It wasn’t a particularly noteworthy kiss, just one of those high school kisses that are more about learning how to feel than actually feeling. I doubt it would have led to anything like a relationship, even the ephemeral kind so common to that age. Still, a kiss is a kiss, and it was memorable enough.
She didn’t show up for school the next day. I was either too nervous—or too immature—to call her. It wouldn’t have mattered. She didn’t show the day after that either. As casually as I could, I asked around to see if she was sick.
No one had any idea who she was.
Understand, this wasn’t a girl who showed up one day and then disappeared. I had known Beth since sixth grade. Most of my friends knew her too, so I was troubled by how they reacted to my inquiries. They began with polite confusion, and then rapidly degenerated to cruel jokes about my imaginary girlfriend. Over the next few days, I learned that none of my teachers had ever heard of her, and there was no record of her ever having been enrolled at my school. While the fruity taste of her lip gloss was still fresh in my mind, not a single other person had any memory of her at all. Torn between my need to understand what had happened, and my need not to be seen as insane, I quietly let it drop.
I think that was the first time my life unhappened. In truth, it’s only the earliest example of which I am certain. It may have unhappened any number of times before that, in ways too subtle for me to perceive, or at times when I would have been too young to understand. Of the two people who would be able to tell me about earlier examples I may have missed, one has retroactively ceased to exist, and the other has yet to be born. That’s not to say I don’t see them from time to time anyway, but neither of them are speaking to me lately.
I want to say what happened to Beth Richmond was the first step on my path to becoming an applied hyperphysicist, and that it inspired my work with time travel, but that probably represents a causality loop. Regardless, that was the day I first became aware of the non-deterministic nature of the universe, and that the past is every bit as flexible as the future.
More to the point, that was the day I realized no one was aware of it but me.
ver the next few years, my life was a series of minor unhappenings. Most had no serious impact on me. I had a red bicycle that one day suddenly became—and had always been—blue. A TV show I had enjoyed for years was never produced. My cat one day was always a dog, with the same name. I found I could train myself to ignore these sudden and bizarre discrepancies, and thus simulate being a normal teen.
These events were usually spread out, separated most times by stretches of several months. Sometimes they came rapid fire. I went through four cars the week after I got my license. They were all gifts from my parents, or rather, they were all the same gift. I was the only one who noticed it varying.
Similarly, I went through four physics teachers my senior year of high school. One would disappear, leaving no legacy or memory in the community, to be replaced by a brand new one everyone had seemingly known for years. Every time it happened, my grade took a sudden, retroactive, and sharp decline. It would take me weeks to pull it back up to anything close to an A, only to have it snatched away again. Unlike most other unhappenings, this was no mere inconvenience. That fall, I had been accepted through early decision to MIT for physics.
I persevered. What choice did I have? Still, the underlying frustration was often difficult to endure. Each successive teacher had a progressively diminished opinion of me, at a time in my life when I was most in need of a sympathetic mentor. It was during this period that I began to cultivate a deliberately detached personality, my only available defense against the constant barrage of rugs being pulled out from under me. I look back on those days now and see them as the phase of my life when I taught myself how not to feel joy, and convinced myself that the world was devoid of wonder. Delight and adventure would be for other people, never for me. Sometimes I reflect on how things would have played out if I had not willingly dropped my emotions into that abyss, but drop them I did. At every shift in reality, I became a colder student, turning further inward, driven to succeed against ever-increasing obstacles.