"long-distance dedication"
Jan. 8th, 2019 10:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sonreirMara
When I was 27, I saved the world.
I don't talk about it a lot. What is there to say?
It wasn't a selfless decision, and so there's no good way to talk about it.
Mara used to call me "Saint Kate," whenever I'd hold her hair back. "Patron of those that cannot hold their liquor." Then she'd laugh, hiccuping halfway through, and I'd try to smile.
I think about her a lot. She's one of the questions I don't have an answer for.
"Was it worth it?" someone asks, and I think of Mara, and being Saint Kate, and I don't know what to say.
I never know what to say.
My parents are ashamed of me. Or were ashamed of me, I guess. It's hard to separate past from present, what has happened and what has not.
They belonged to a religious order -- one of the obscure, doomsday cults. The Order of the New Dawn, or something like that. Picture a white-bearded preacher standing over a pulpit, spitting words about how we're all sinners undeserving of God's love, or how we're all going to Hell because children are being taught in schools that the world is round and a woman's place is anywhere she wants it to be, and that's about the gist of it.
He predicted that the world would end in October of 2006. In a way, I guess he was right -- my world ended.
My parents were ashamed of me because I was supposed to be a boy, but I wasn't. They opted not to find out, after their preacher told them that I was going to be a boy.
"I can feel his masculine energy, the fruit of your womb," I can picture him saying, and my parents bowing their heads in prayer.
They had a name picked out for me. I was supposed to be Jacob, for my dad's dad.
When I was born a girl, the preacher said that there was a mistake, that it must have been because my mother had committed some kind of sin. Perhaps she'd drunk alcohol during pregnancy, even by accident? Perhaps she had looked upon someone else with lust?
She swore she hadn't, and the preacher said that it was because I was born with sin staining my soul.
"All you can do is pray," he said, and shook his head, whenever he saw me. "A sweet little baby, they're supposed to be without sin, and yet here she is, her soul not even fully formed and yet blacker than anyone else in the congregation."
They named me Mary Katherine, after my dad's mom.
I went by Kate as soon as I was old enough to have a choice.
I survived to adolescence, despite the preacher stating that the world would end on November 4th, 1998, and then again on May 22, 2000.
I was home-schooled for the first few years of life, and then my mom gave up. More accurately, my dad gave up, and my mom had to go back to work because there was no way to support the family otherwise.
They enrolled me in the local public school my freshman year, and that's how I met Mara.
My plan for high school was to keep my head down, stay out of trouble, and try to piece together everything I'd learned about the outside world enough to be able to apply to college in the fall of my senior year, preferably without either of my parents finding out until I was gone.
Mara changed that. We met in seventh period math.
"Hey, new girl," she said from the seat behind me, poking me in the back with a pencil. "Where are you from?"
"Um," I said. I wasn't sure how to answer. "Here?"
"Like, the school?" She laughed. "You're weird. I like it. I'm Mara. What's your name?"
"Kate," I said.
Just like that, we were friends.
Mara found out about my parents, the church, everything. She tried to free me -- but I'd already realized that I wasn't exactly church material.
"They seriously told you that you were born a sinner, and that's why you're a girl?" she laughed, when that old story came out. "Wild."
"Not so wild if you're the one living it."
"Yeah, well."
She didn't press -- when I didn't want to talk about something, she wouldn't lean on me to say anything. She had a way of making me comfortable -- when I wanted to say something, somehow she knew exactly when to stay quiet versus when to encourage me.
I told her everything -- about the church (terrible), my relationship with my parents (strained), our problems with money (also terrible), and how I was planning to escape when I turned eighteen.
She told me everything about herself, as well. About her parents' divorce and how it had affected her life ("they're done screaming at each other and pretending that that's love, thank God"), about her plans for the future ("the local community college has a welding program and I know a guy who can get me a decent job if I'm willing to do shit off-shore, but I have to be willing to learn on dry land first -- those guys make bank"), her crushes ("Tony sat next to me during free period and I told him to move, I don't want him to think I like him too much") -- everything.
We could be open with each other like that.
Mara came home with me for dinner once -- just once.
It was an utter shitshow.
After it was over, I walked her home.
"You really have to escape that church," she told me, as soon as we were out of earshot of my parents.
"Yeah, I know. I just don't know how."
"College," she said. "We'll be roommates. We can probably afford some shitty apartment across town. Robbie said he'd sell me his Corolla when he graduates next year. It needs new brakes, but I can change 'em, or bribe Seth to do it. C'mon."
I shrugged. "Okay," I said. "We'll be roommates."
"Great!" She hugged me. "I already found out about a really cheap apartment. It's a studio, but the rent is, like, only four hundred a month. Split two ways that's nothing. We can cover that, easy."
"Okay," I repeated, because I didn't know what else to say. Her plan sounded weirdly feasible, and besides, what did I know about escaping? Better throw my lot in with hers than get married off to someone in the church because my parents demanded it.
I turned eighteen the October of our senior year.
As soon as I became an adult, my parents started talking to me about the future, how I'd be allowed to live with them if I followed their rules.
Such as letting young men from the church court me, and agreeing to only wear skirts outside of the house, and to cover my hair wherever I went.
"I don't think I can do that," I said, honestly, and my mother gave me a steely-eyed look and told me to think carefully about what decision it was I was making.
Things had been tense at home for a while. I'd known this was coming. My parents were never abusive in the classic ways that other kids at the high school could tell stories about, but there was something off about them. I'd figured that out without Mara's help, but her comments on my stories had cemented it firmly: it's something about them, not something about me.
When I repeated that I couldn't agree to let young men of the church court me, my mother repeated the prayer that the preacher had, for casting out evil.
"And I refute her thus, for I will not accept a sinner into my heart," she chanted, following me through the house as I grabbed the bag I'd prepared for this eventuality. "Not into my heart nor into my house, so help me lord..."
I texted Mara as all of this was unfolding, with the phone my mom didn't know I had. They flipped hard, need u to get me
She wrote back right away: be there in five babe <3
That was how I moved out.
I lived with Mara and her mom and stepdad until we both graduated. I found a job, and so did Mara -- working at a pretzel stand in the mall.
"This is not how I pictured the glamorous summer after graduation," I joked with her, twisting pretzel dough and dropping it onto a baking sheet.
"Just be glad you're not married to some dude and knocked up," she said, taking the sheet from me and shoving it into one of the pretzel ovens. "Like your parents wanted."
"Yeah, well. Pretzels aren't exactly where I saw my life going."
"We're starting college in the fall," she pointed out. "Don't be such a downer. Get your two-year, transfer to a real school, and leave this podunk shithole behind."
I laughed. "You still planning on becoming a welder?"
"Um, yeah," she said. She would have flipped her hair, I think, if it had not been tucked under our uniform hat. "They make, like, eighty grand a year. Do you know how much my mom makes?"
Mara's mom was an HR manager for one of the biggest companies in the tri-state area. She had a forty-five minute commute to and from work every day, but she bragged constantly that she made bank -- "way more than my sad sack piece of shit ex-husband ever made, that's for damn sure."
"No idea," I admitted.
"Like, half that. Fifty grand, maybe."
I burst out laughing. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Look at you," Mara laughed along with me. "Dropping the f-bomb like a pro. Yeah, I saw one of her pay stubs and, like, that shit is not worth bragging about."
"No," I said. "But you're gonna make more than that."
"I'm gonna make, like, double that," said Mara, satisfied.
We started at the community college in the fall.
Mara started her welding classes, which she loved, and I, unsure of what I wanted to do, tentatively said I wanted to become an engineer.
"Engineers make good money, don't they?" I asked her, clutching my class schedule and list of textbooks as we waited in line at the bookstore.
"Yeah, but you have to go to school for, like, ever." She made a face. "It's safer, though, if that's your bag."
"Yeah," I said.
My parents divorced the fall I started college. My mom started calling me around then. I don't know where she got my phone number from -- I suspect Mara's mom, moved by some pity (what if it was my daughter?), gave it to her.
Her voicemails -- I never picked up the phone if I could help it -- started off sweet enough.
"Hey hon, it's your mom. Look...I know we have a lot to talk about. Louise has been telling me about what you and Mara have been up to. College -- I'm so proud! If you don't know by now, I've left the church, and your dad and I are getting a divorce."
When I didn't answer, after a few months, the voicemails got angry.
"You don't have to be such a martyr. Stop pretending I did anything to you, and answer my calls."
Mara heard her, at one point, in one of the voicemails I tried to pretend hadn't arrived but ultimately did not succeed in hiding, and made light of it. That's where "Saint Kate" came from -- she overheard the angry voicemail.
"Martyr, huh?" she asked. "All because you won't answer her calls?"
"Something like that."
"Isn't that, like, a precursor for sainthood? Martyrdom?"
"I don't know," I mumbled.
"Weren't you the churchy one?" she pressed.
"Yeah, but that's, like, a Catholic thing. My parents' church doesn't believe in saints -- they're 'pagan idols'."
"All the better to name you one," Mara laughed. "Saint Kate, the patron of...something."
The liquor part came later, after I answered one of my mom's calls and she tried to cheer me up from the resulting fallout by sneaking out with Robbie and his fake ID, and getting him to buy me a handle of cheap vodka.
"C'mon, you can drink and forget."
I drank, and I didn't like it. It burned all the way down.
Mara, though -- she must have liked something about it. She drank until she threw up and I held her hair.
"Saint Kate," she laughed in the bathroom, the sound echoing oddly off the chipped tiles. "Patron of those that cannot hold their liquor."
I just rolled my eyes and got her a glass of water. What else could I do?
This is where the narrative splits, where time falls apart and I have to remember what happened-happened and what happened-unhappened.
There's no good language for this.
In one version of things, Mara is hit by a car, walking across campus. It's late and she's wearing dark clothing, and the person who hits her makes a decision not to stop, to keep driving without so much as anonymously calling in an accident.
I'm working that night, working late at the terrible pretzel stand, and I don't realize that something is amiss until she doesn't show up to pick me up from work. We have a system worked out where I take the bus to work, and on nights when I have to close, she makes sure to pick me up so I don't have to walk home in the dark. There have been a string of muggings in our quiet town, and neither of us wants to lose our shit.
When she doesn't show up, I text her. where r u?
I give it a good five minutes -- she's always prompt at texting me back -- and when she doesn't, I call her.
It's when she doesn't pick up the phone that I should think that something's up -- that something has gone wrong, that she's been hurt or worse -- but it doesn't click for me, not then.
I text her again: Im walking home now. see u there??
Mara isn't found until morning, and by then it's much, much too late.
In another version, I never go into work at the pretzel stand. She doesn't need to pick me up, and so she doesn't hurry. She takes her time and flirts with the cute boy at the library, the one on work-study who is closing.
She doesn't really need to study -- her classes are more hands-on and practical than they are book-learning -- but she knows that he works there, and anyway, a little reading never hurt anyone, so she goes to see him and after his shift is over, when the library is closed, he asks her if she wants to get coffee.
There is no car. No one gets hit. No one gets hurt, and no one dies.
In the first version of the story, I go to the funeral. I talk about Mara, about how she was like a sister to me, how she helped me navigate the world, taught me how to make friends and helped me dream about a life beyond what I had ever imagined for myself.
After the funeral, I go home and drink until I black out.
When I wake up the next morning, with a fierce hangover and a resolution never to drink again, I down a bunch of water and throw myself into my studies. It's what Mara would have wanted.
I study and get good grades. I'm offered a prestigious scholarship to a university I wouldn't have dared apply to if I hadn't had Mara's voice in the back of my head, telling me, fuck 'em, apply anyway.
I graduate from there. I go on to do a master's degree, then a PhD. After the PhD, I accept a job with a company few people have heard of, but which those that know, fear.
They're experimenting with the nature of time. They have found, they feel, a way to fold time back on itself, allow for someone to go back and relive parts of their life.
They've never been able to successfully open a portal, long-term, but when I take a look at the plans, I have an idea for what might work.
When we open the first portal, when it stays open long enough for the CEO to go back and pick a single flower, he smiles at me, a rare smile, and tells me: "Kate. We have use for you, I think."
I think only of Mara, of what she would say if she were here.
We've done all the math, enough to know that the past cannot be changed, and so I don't try. I don't tell myself, this is something we could fix.
I think about Mara every day, and I know I cannot save her.
In the second version, I do not accept my own limitations.
I go back in time and I save Mara. I see her hit and I call for an ambulance. I'm a stranger in the night.
I still study hard, and I get the job that allows me to go back, but my relationship with Mara is changed: we have a fight, once she's out of the hospital, because all I do is study, and she can't stand it.
We don't speak again, and the end result is much the same.
In both the first and the second scenario, something happens.
After we learn to stabilize the connection to the past, things begin to go awry. Everything goes terribly wrong, and it's clear that unless we can find a solution, nothing good will come of our technology advance. Quite the opposite.
Time is a river, our CEO says, and we've learned to build a boat, to equip it with an engine and go against the current -- but it's more complicated than that. We haven't learned to "fight the current". We've violently ripped a hole in our understanding of reality, and we're paying for it.
There are terms for what happened. They're sensationalist and don't accurately convey just what it is that we were up against.
I worked hard to try to figure out where we had gone wrong, what we had done.
Eventually, I realized: it was my fault.
In the third version of the story, I accept my own limitations, but I go back in time anyway.
I don't go back to save Mara. I go back further.
Freshman year, the first day of school. New school, new me. Small town, so everyone knows everyone else, but that's not important.
I was running late that day. Mom didn't quite know what forms she was supposed to bring, and so there was a huge kerfuffle in the main office, something about how I was supposed to have submitted proof of vaccination before I started, but Mom hadn't brought my records and Dad had to run them over.
I have to run -- run! -- to first period English.
It's on the second floor.
I arrive in time to see my teenaged self running for the stairs.
I see her sprint up the staircase only to stop at the top, winded.
I have two memories of this:
In the first, I am standing at the top of the stairs. I'm going to be late for English, and I know it. I want to make a good first impression, and this definitely isn't it. I've already missed home room, I don't want to miss first period, too. I pause for a second, wheezing, because I'm out of breath, and I see someone out of the corner of my eye.
"I'm sorry," she says, and her voice sounds oddly familiar to me.
She pushes me, and I fall backward down the stairs.
When I come to, I've broken my arm in two places, and I'm screaming from the pain.
I never make it to English, never go to seventh-period math. Mom drives me to the hospital, tight-lipped. If we were different people, she would talk about suing the school, about liability and safety.
She doesn't, though.
I need surgery on my arm, pinning it in two places.
By the time I finally end up back in school, Mom's had time to arrange a few things, and they've agreed to let me test into higher math.
I don't meet Mara. I make other friends. I keep my head down.
My parents get divorced midway through my junior year. There is no talk about getting married young, about staying in the church. My mom finds out that my dad is cheating on her with someone from the doomsday cult he still attends every Sunday, and she leaves and takes me with her.
When I go to college, I major in Russian. I become a translator. It's interesting work, and it takes me all over Europe.
In the second memory, I am watching my teenaged self stand at the top of the stairs.
I know I have only one chance, and I nearly let it slip by.
"I'm sorry," I tell her, because I know what I am about to do, what I am hoping for. Mara will live, the world will be saved -- it's not a selfless decision, and it's not the best I could do, but it's the best outcome for everyone else. I've run the numbers. I've done the math.
It's what I want for her, because I love her like a sister.
I push my younger self, watch her fall down the stairs. Her arm breaks, and I feel myself fade.
This memory is a dream, a relic from a different time.
Sometimes I wake in the night and can't remember where or when I am, if this is real, or if I dreamed it all.
I remember Mara intensely. I remember being Saint Kate, the relationship we had. I remember my parents' church and the choice I was forced to make, that ended up being no choice at all.
I wonder if I made the right decision, if this is the best that things could possibly be. There's a niggling feeling in the back of my mind, you did not make the right decision, but this is the one.
In this one, Mara lives. I saved the world.
But did you save yourself?
No, but that was never the point.
I'm 32 now. I'm married. I have a child, a daughter.
"What will we name her?" asks my husband, after we find out.
"Mara," I say. "I've always loved the name Mara."
---
I toyed around with the idea of writing something about time travel -- a love story, where the time traveler maintains their devotion to their loved one across time and space -- long-distance indeed.
As I wrote it, I realized that the love story I was telling was not romantic in nature, but platonic, and that the dedication -- across time and space -- was something different than what I had thought it would be.
This was the end result.
Thank you for taking the time to read it.
When I was 27, I saved the world.
I don't talk about it a lot. What is there to say?
It wasn't a selfless decision, and so there's no good way to talk about it.
Mara used to call me "Saint Kate," whenever I'd hold her hair back. "Patron of those that cannot hold their liquor." Then she'd laugh, hiccuping halfway through, and I'd try to smile.
I think about her a lot. She's one of the questions I don't have an answer for.
"Was it worth it?" someone asks, and I think of Mara, and being Saint Kate, and I don't know what to say.
I never know what to say.
My parents are ashamed of me. Or were ashamed of me, I guess. It's hard to separate past from present, what has happened and what has not.
They belonged to a religious order -- one of the obscure, doomsday cults. The Order of the New Dawn, or something like that. Picture a white-bearded preacher standing over a pulpit, spitting words about how we're all sinners undeserving of God's love, or how we're all going to Hell because children are being taught in schools that the world is round and a woman's place is anywhere she wants it to be, and that's about the gist of it.
He predicted that the world would end in October of 2006. In a way, I guess he was right -- my world ended.
My parents were ashamed of me because I was supposed to be a boy, but I wasn't. They opted not to find out, after their preacher told them that I was going to be a boy.
"I can feel his masculine energy, the fruit of your womb," I can picture him saying, and my parents bowing their heads in prayer.
They had a name picked out for me. I was supposed to be Jacob, for my dad's dad.
When I was born a girl, the preacher said that there was a mistake, that it must have been because my mother had committed some kind of sin. Perhaps she'd drunk alcohol during pregnancy, even by accident? Perhaps she had looked upon someone else with lust?
She swore she hadn't, and the preacher said that it was because I was born with sin staining my soul.
"All you can do is pray," he said, and shook his head, whenever he saw me. "A sweet little baby, they're supposed to be without sin, and yet here she is, her soul not even fully formed and yet blacker than anyone else in the congregation."
They named me Mary Katherine, after my dad's mom.
I went by Kate as soon as I was old enough to have a choice.
I survived to adolescence, despite the preacher stating that the world would end on November 4th, 1998, and then again on May 22, 2000.
I was home-schooled for the first few years of life, and then my mom gave up. More accurately, my dad gave up, and my mom had to go back to work because there was no way to support the family otherwise.
They enrolled me in the local public school my freshman year, and that's how I met Mara.
My plan for high school was to keep my head down, stay out of trouble, and try to piece together everything I'd learned about the outside world enough to be able to apply to college in the fall of my senior year, preferably without either of my parents finding out until I was gone.
Mara changed that. We met in seventh period math.
"Hey, new girl," she said from the seat behind me, poking me in the back with a pencil. "Where are you from?"
"Um," I said. I wasn't sure how to answer. "Here?"
"Like, the school?" She laughed. "You're weird. I like it. I'm Mara. What's your name?"
"Kate," I said.
Just like that, we were friends.
Mara found out about my parents, the church, everything. She tried to free me -- but I'd already realized that I wasn't exactly church material.
"They seriously told you that you were born a sinner, and that's why you're a girl?" she laughed, when that old story came out. "Wild."
"Not so wild if you're the one living it."
"Yeah, well."
She didn't press -- when I didn't want to talk about something, she wouldn't lean on me to say anything. She had a way of making me comfortable -- when I wanted to say something, somehow she knew exactly when to stay quiet versus when to encourage me.
I told her everything -- about the church (terrible), my relationship with my parents (strained), our problems with money (also terrible), and how I was planning to escape when I turned eighteen.
She told me everything about herself, as well. About her parents' divorce and how it had affected her life ("they're done screaming at each other and pretending that that's love, thank God"), about her plans for the future ("the local community college has a welding program and I know a guy who can get me a decent job if I'm willing to do shit off-shore, but I have to be willing to learn on dry land first -- those guys make bank"), her crushes ("Tony sat next to me during free period and I told him to move, I don't want him to think I like him too much") -- everything.
We could be open with each other like that.
Mara came home with me for dinner once -- just once.
It was an utter shitshow.
After it was over, I walked her home.
"You really have to escape that church," she told me, as soon as we were out of earshot of my parents.
"Yeah, I know. I just don't know how."
"College," she said. "We'll be roommates. We can probably afford some shitty apartment across town. Robbie said he'd sell me his Corolla when he graduates next year. It needs new brakes, but I can change 'em, or bribe Seth to do it. C'mon."
I shrugged. "Okay," I said. "We'll be roommates."
"Great!" She hugged me. "I already found out about a really cheap apartment. It's a studio, but the rent is, like, only four hundred a month. Split two ways that's nothing. We can cover that, easy."
"Okay," I repeated, because I didn't know what else to say. Her plan sounded weirdly feasible, and besides, what did I know about escaping? Better throw my lot in with hers than get married off to someone in the church because my parents demanded it.
I turned eighteen the October of our senior year.
As soon as I became an adult, my parents started talking to me about the future, how I'd be allowed to live with them if I followed their rules.
Such as letting young men from the church court me, and agreeing to only wear skirts outside of the house, and to cover my hair wherever I went.
"I don't think I can do that," I said, honestly, and my mother gave me a steely-eyed look and told me to think carefully about what decision it was I was making.
Things had been tense at home for a while. I'd known this was coming. My parents were never abusive in the classic ways that other kids at the high school could tell stories about, but there was something off about them. I'd figured that out without Mara's help, but her comments on my stories had cemented it firmly: it's something about them, not something about me.
When I repeated that I couldn't agree to let young men of the church court me, my mother repeated the prayer that the preacher had, for casting out evil.
"And I refute her thus, for I will not accept a sinner into my heart," she chanted, following me through the house as I grabbed the bag I'd prepared for this eventuality. "Not into my heart nor into my house, so help me lord..."
I texted Mara as all of this was unfolding, with the phone my mom didn't know I had. They flipped hard, need u to get me
She wrote back right away: be there in five babe <3
That was how I moved out.
I lived with Mara and her mom and stepdad until we both graduated. I found a job, and so did Mara -- working at a pretzel stand in the mall.
"This is not how I pictured the glamorous summer after graduation," I joked with her, twisting pretzel dough and dropping it onto a baking sheet.
"Just be glad you're not married to some dude and knocked up," she said, taking the sheet from me and shoving it into one of the pretzel ovens. "Like your parents wanted."
"Yeah, well. Pretzels aren't exactly where I saw my life going."
"We're starting college in the fall," she pointed out. "Don't be such a downer. Get your two-year, transfer to a real school, and leave this podunk shithole behind."
I laughed. "You still planning on becoming a welder?"
"Um, yeah," she said. She would have flipped her hair, I think, if it had not been tucked under our uniform hat. "They make, like, eighty grand a year. Do you know how much my mom makes?"
Mara's mom was an HR manager for one of the biggest companies in the tri-state area. She had a forty-five minute commute to and from work every day, but she bragged constantly that she made bank -- "way more than my sad sack piece of shit ex-husband ever made, that's for damn sure."
"No idea," I admitted.
"Like, half that. Fifty grand, maybe."
I burst out laughing. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
"Look at you," Mara laughed along with me. "Dropping the f-bomb like a pro. Yeah, I saw one of her pay stubs and, like, that shit is not worth bragging about."
"No," I said. "But you're gonna make more than that."
"I'm gonna make, like, double that," said Mara, satisfied.
We started at the community college in the fall.
Mara started her welding classes, which she loved, and I, unsure of what I wanted to do, tentatively said I wanted to become an engineer.
"Engineers make good money, don't they?" I asked her, clutching my class schedule and list of textbooks as we waited in line at the bookstore.
"Yeah, but you have to go to school for, like, ever." She made a face. "It's safer, though, if that's your bag."
"Yeah," I said.
My parents divorced the fall I started college. My mom started calling me around then. I don't know where she got my phone number from -- I suspect Mara's mom, moved by some pity (what if it was my daughter?), gave it to her.
Her voicemails -- I never picked up the phone if I could help it -- started off sweet enough.
"Hey hon, it's your mom. Look...I know we have a lot to talk about. Louise has been telling me about what you and Mara have been up to. College -- I'm so proud! If you don't know by now, I've left the church, and your dad and I are getting a divorce."
When I didn't answer, after a few months, the voicemails got angry.
"You don't have to be such a martyr. Stop pretending I did anything to you, and answer my calls."
Mara heard her, at one point, in one of the voicemails I tried to pretend hadn't arrived but ultimately did not succeed in hiding, and made light of it. That's where "Saint Kate" came from -- she overheard the angry voicemail.
"Martyr, huh?" she asked. "All because you won't answer her calls?"
"Something like that."
"Isn't that, like, a precursor for sainthood? Martyrdom?"
"I don't know," I mumbled.
"Weren't you the churchy one?" she pressed.
"Yeah, but that's, like, a Catholic thing. My parents' church doesn't believe in saints -- they're 'pagan idols'."
"All the better to name you one," Mara laughed. "Saint Kate, the patron of...something."
The liquor part came later, after I answered one of my mom's calls and she tried to cheer me up from the resulting fallout by sneaking out with Robbie and his fake ID, and getting him to buy me a handle of cheap vodka.
"C'mon, you can drink and forget."
I drank, and I didn't like it. It burned all the way down.
Mara, though -- she must have liked something about it. She drank until she threw up and I held her hair.
"Saint Kate," she laughed in the bathroom, the sound echoing oddly off the chipped tiles. "Patron of those that cannot hold their liquor."
I just rolled my eyes and got her a glass of water. What else could I do?
This is where the narrative splits, where time falls apart and I have to remember what happened-happened and what happened-unhappened.
There's no good language for this.
In one version of things, Mara is hit by a car, walking across campus. It's late and she's wearing dark clothing, and the person who hits her makes a decision not to stop, to keep driving without so much as anonymously calling in an accident.
I'm working that night, working late at the terrible pretzel stand, and I don't realize that something is amiss until she doesn't show up to pick me up from work. We have a system worked out where I take the bus to work, and on nights when I have to close, she makes sure to pick me up so I don't have to walk home in the dark. There have been a string of muggings in our quiet town, and neither of us wants to lose our shit.
When she doesn't show up, I text her. where r u?
I give it a good five minutes -- she's always prompt at texting me back -- and when she doesn't, I call her.
It's when she doesn't pick up the phone that I should think that something's up -- that something has gone wrong, that she's been hurt or worse -- but it doesn't click for me, not then.
I text her again: Im walking home now. see u there??
Mara isn't found until morning, and by then it's much, much too late.
In another version, I never go into work at the pretzel stand. She doesn't need to pick me up, and so she doesn't hurry. She takes her time and flirts with the cute boy at the library, the one on work-study who is closing.
She doesn't really need to study -- her classes are more hands-on and practical than they are book-learning -- but she knows that he works there, and anyway, a little reading never hurt anyone, so she goes to see him and after his shift is over, when the library is closed, he asks her if she wants to get coffee.
There is no car. No one gets hit. No one gets hurt, and no one dies.
In the first version of the story, I go to the funeral. I talk about Mara, about how she was like a sister to me, how she helped me navigate the world, taught me how to make friends and helped me dream about a life beyond what I had ever imagined for myself.
After the funeral, I go home and drink until I black out.
When I wake up the next morning, with a fierce hangover and a resolution never to drink again, I down a bunch of water and throw myself into my studies. It's what Mara would have wanted.
I study and get good grades. I'm offered a prestigious scholarship to a university I wouldn't have dared apply to if I hadn't had Mara's voice in the back of my head, telling me, fuck 'em, apply anyway.
I graduate from there. I go on to do a master's degree, then a PhD. After the PhD, I accept a job with a company few people have heard of, but which those that know, fear.
They're experimenting with the nature of time. They have found, they feel, a way to fold time back on itself, allow for someone to go back and relive parts of their life.
They've never been able to successfully open a portal, long-term, but when I take a look at the plans, I have an idea for what might work.
When we open the first portal, when it stays open long enough for the CEO to go back and pick a single flower, he smiles at me, a rare smile, and tells me: "Kate. We have use for you, I think."
I think only of Mara, of what she would say if she were here.
We've done all the math, enough to know that the past cannot be changed, and so I don't try. I don't tell myself, this is something we could fix.
I think about Mara every day, and I know I cannot save her.
In the second version, I do not accept my own limitations.
I go back in time and I save Mara. I see her hit and I call for an ambulance. I'm a stranger in the night.
I still study hard, and I get the job that allows me to go back, but my relationship with Mara is changed: we have a fight, once she's out of the hospital, because all I do is study, and she can't stand it.
We don't speak again, and the end result is much the same.
In both the first and the second scenario, something happens.
After we learn to stabilize the connection to the past, things begin to go awry. Everything goes terribly wrong, and it's clear that unless we can find a solution, nothing good will come of our technology advance. Quite the opposite.
Time is a river, our CEO says, and we've learned to build a boat, to equip it with an engine and go against the current -- but it's more complicated than that. We haven't learned to "fight the current". We've violently ripped a hole in our understanding of reality, and we're paying for it.
There are terms for what happened. They're sensationalist and don't accurately convey just what it is that we were up against.
I worked hard to try to figure out where we had gone wrong, what we had done.
Eventually, I realized: it was my fault.
In the third version of the story, I accept my own limitations, but I go back in time anyway.
I don't go back to save Mara. I go back further.
Freshman year, the first day of school. New school, new me. Small town, so everyone knows everyone else, but that's not important.
I was running late that day. Mom didn't quite know what forms she was supposed to bring, and so there was a huge kerfuffle in the main office, something about how I was supposed to have submitted proof of vaccination before I started, but Mom hadn't brought my records and Dad had to run them over.
I have to run -- run! -- to first period English.
It's on the second floor.
I arrive in time to see my teenaged self running for the stairs.
I see her sprint up the staircase only to stop at the top, winded.
I have two memories of this:
In the first, I am standing at the top of the stairs. I'm going to be late for English, and I know it. I want to make a good first impression, and this definitely isn't it. I've already missed home room, I don't want to miss first period, too. I pause for a second, wheezing, because I'm out of breath, and I see someone out of the corner of my eye.
"I'm sorry," she says, and her voice sounds oddly familiar to me.
She pushes me, and I fall backward down the stairs.
When I come to, I've broken my arm in two places, and I'm screaming from the pain.
I never make it to English, never go to seventh-period math. Mom drives me to the hospital, tight-lipped. If we were different people, she would talk about suing the school, about liability and safety.
She doesn't, though.
I need surgery on my arm, pinning it in two places.
By the time I finally end up back in school, Mom's had time to arrange a few things, and they've agreed to let me test into higher math.
I don't meet Mara. I make other friends. I keep my head down.
My parents get divorced midway through my junior year. There is no talk about getting married young, about staying in the church. My mom finds out that my dad is cheating on her with someone from the doomsday cult he still attends every Sunday, and she leaves and takes me with her.
When I go to college, I major in Russian. I become a translator. It's interesting work, and it takes me all over Europe.
In the second memory, I am watching my teenaged self stand at the top of the stairs.
I know I have only one chance, and I nearly let it slip by.
"I'm sorry," I tell her, because I know what I am about to do, what I am hoping for. Mara will live, the world will be saved -- it's not a selfless decision, and it's not the best I could do, but it's the best outcome for everyone else. I've run the numbers. I've done the math.
It's what I want for her, because I love her like a sister.
I push my younger self, watch her fall down the stairs. Her arm breaks, and I feel myself fade.
This memory is a dream, a relic from a different time.
Sometimes I wake in the night and can't remember where or when I am, if this is real, or if I dreamed it all.
I remember Mara intensely. I remember being Saint Kate, the relationship we had. I remember my parents' church and the choice I was forced to make, that ended up being no choice at all.
I wonder if I made the right decision, if this is the best that things could possibly be. There's a niggling feeling in the back of my mind, you did not make the right decision, but this is the one.
In this one, Mara lives. I saved the world.
But did you save yourself?
No, but that was never the point.
I'm 32 now. I'm married. I have a child, a daughter.
"What will we name her?" asks my husband, after we find out.
"Mara," I say. "I've always loved the name Mara."
---
I toyed around with the idea of writing something about time travel -- a love story, where the time traveler maintains their devotion to their loved one across time and space -- long-distance indeed.
As I wrote it, I realized that the love story I was telling was not romantic in nature, but platonic, and that the dedication -- across time and space -- was something different than what I had thought it would be.
This was the end result.
Thank you for taking the time to read it.
