Five. Your counselor taught you how to hang on to the present moment, which is ironic. It’s supposed to be a tool you can use in moments of stress, to keep you from slipping out into an anticipated, anxiety-producing future.

You try to use it now, when your counselor is leaning across her low coffee table, and you can see the canned, clinical compassion in her eyes when she says, “Sweetie, I know this is difficult to hear, but I think that the way your mother treats you has crossed a line into abuse.”

You can see her waiting for you to react. Wow, maybe, or What a breakthrough we’ve made today, like she says when you start crying during your sessions.

You wonder what she would say if you told her the woman who dropped you off—the woman your counselor is talking about—isn’t your mother. She’s you. Your future self, traveled back in time.

Four. She’s waiting in the car, thumbs tight on the steering wheel. In the dove-grey suit separates your mother used to wear, she really does look like your mother, which means that, someday, you will, too. She glances over when the car stops at lights, moistens her lips, glances away.

Your mother wouldn’t do that. Your mother had a knack for cutting through awkwardness and saying what everyone else was too nervous to say. She would run her thumb along the marks on your arm, where the baby fat bruised like a dropped piece of fruit, and say thoughtfully, “I don’t know about you, kiddo, but I’m not feeling like going back to work. What say we play hooky?”

And she would slip off her white coat, and you would leave your backpack in the trunk. You would walk around the mall together, deserted on a weekday. Before she quit her job, she would buy you one of the pretzels that were so sweet and yeasty you could taste it even before you peeled off a flaky layer and put it in your mouth. You would sit together in the food court, you peeling off one layer, her peeling off the next, and she would say, “Why the long face, baby?”

The comfort this memory brings you is as ephemeral as each curl of dough against your tongue.

Your future self is quiet until you’re pulling up to the high school. You’re grabbing your backpack and avoiding her gaze when she says, “You know, I’m glad you’ve started doing this. You’ll need to be mentally strong if you’re going to survive.”

Three. You saw her for the first time at your front door, like she wanted to sell you something or convert you. She had light hair and dark eyes, and she was wearing fatigues, which was the only way you knew that your panicked prayers of the last few minutes had not come true.

“Don’t freak out,” she said. “I’m you. From—uh, let’s just say from the future. Can I come inside?”

So you let her in, because you hadn’t learned you shouldn’t yet, and because she looked so catastrophically like your mother. Your mother, whom you had found uncharacteristically lying on the couch when you returned home from school. Who still looked like she had only dozed off waiting for dinner to cook.

“I thought I had forgotten this place,” your future self said, slipping her shoes off. You watched her set the kettle on the stove and scoop out some of your mother’s loose leaf tea you hadn’t learned to like yet. Except that someday you will, you realized with a jolt. Someday you will have your mother’s face. You will wear combat fatigues. You will knock on the door of this house.

It was like looking down one end of a telescope, then the other. Everything getting closer, then shooting far away.

“I think I’m supposed to call someone,” you said. Your voice was gritty with tears, which was how you discovered that you were crying. Your face was so numb, it felt like someone else’s tears against it. “Do you call 911? Is it an emergency if she’s already dead?”

“Don’t call anyone yet,” your future self said, setting a mug of tea in front of you. “There are some things you need to understand. First, your mother invented time travel. It’s why she quit her job at the university. She knew this was a big deal, and she hadn’t decided what to do about it yet.”

“Cool,” you said. It wasn’t cool. You didn’t know why you said that. It was like there was a great white fog in your brain, blotting out all your thoughts.

It was true that you did not exactly understand what your mother did for work. She used to smile and say that she would explain it when you finished Calc 3 and Intro to Physics. You knew you should be thinking about time travel now, that it had found its way to your door, that it was already inside your house. But you could not turn your mind away from the fact that you would finish Calc 3 this year, and your mother would not be able to keep her word and explain.

Your backpack was still sitting by the front door. You could smell something savory and recently defrosted that your mother had set in the oven to cook. It felt like you should be able to put your shoes back on, walk back down the street to the bus stop, and try coming home again, to see if this time your mother opened the door. For the first time in your young life, you understood the great cruelty, the inflexibility of time, flowing ceaselessly in one direction and never turning back.

“She was trying to map out all the possibilities and limitations before she published,” your future self said. “Truthfully, I think she was also contemplating shredding her papers and forgetting she ever discovered this. But she was still deciding when, today, an undiagnosed aneurysm in her brain ruptured, and she died. Um. Sorry.”

Two. You watched her watching you not freak out. “You’re less emotional about this than I remember being,” she said.

Because, of course, she had sat where you were sitting, and listened to what she was saying now. Or was that not how time worked after all? Keeping it straight felt like an electrical fire in your brain.

You wondered, with a jolt, if this was what having an aneurysm felt like.

But none of this must have shown on your face, because your future self said, “For the time being, I’m going to pretend to be your mother. I think I can pull it off, as long as I don’t see any of her friends. So you don’t need to worry about school or anything.”

It hadn’t occurred to you to worry about that.

“One more thing,” your future self said. There were lines on her face that hadn’t been there a moment before. How old was she? Younger than your mother, older than you? “It’s about why I’ve come back in time. I’m here because something bad is going to happen. To you. Well, to many people. Something apocalyptic. I’m going to teach you what you need to survive.”

One. From your bedroom window, if you look straight down, you can still see the little mound tucked behind the rosebushes, where the neighbors can’t see. It’s where you helped your future self carry your mother’s lukewarm body, still in the neat clothes and pantyhose she wore even when she was unemployed. Under the cover of night, you watched your future self tip dirt over your mother’s still face, and it wasn’t until then that it occurred to you that you’d heard of people getting surgery for aneurysms before.

That with all her foreknowledge, your future self waited to come until your mother was dead. That you shouldn’t have held open the door, you shouldn’t have let her make you tea, you should have taken your chances with the rest of the world rather than let this eerie future twin of yours, your mother’s other daughter, step into your life.

But by the time your mother’s body disappeared—by the time there was only your future self, dressing in her clothes, stepping into her high-heeled shoes—it was too late.

Four things you can feel

Four. The story of you and your future self is told in pain, in an endless stream of aches, of ruptures in the skin, that begins with the blisters from when you helped her bury your mother, and will presumably end with whatever future catastrophe transmutes you into her.

She calls it training: the unceasing, relentless series of tests that you never get right, that will supposedly teach you everything you must know in order to survive. It begins the morning after you bury your mother together, when she pokes you awake with cold fingers and makes you run with her through the darkness of your suburban neighborhood, before anyone is awake to see.

You aren’t good at running. The closest you have come to this before is being a Mathlete at school.

“But if you’re here, you did survive,” you pant, sounds barely words, just teeth closing on breath. “So what am I supposed to do? Survive better?”

“Yes,” she says, and stops. Your long, endless circle has brought you back to your house. There is sharp gravel pressed into your knees from when you fell. In your mind, you are already inside, trying to get the gravel out, when she says, “Again, but this time without shoes.”

Three. You become a connoisseur for pain, you have opinions and nuanced thoughts on it. For instance, you dislike exercising until you are sick. But there are other sensations that you hate more. Like the pain of darts in your skin, from a set your mother idly bought for parties. It starts cold and ends hot.

You shriek when the first one goes into your skin. Your future self is standing in the corner of your room behind the door, waiting for you to walk by with your nose in a book before she threw them.

“I don’t understand,” you say. You are weeping, eyes stinging, from shock. You have locked yourself in the bathroom, desperate to put a door between yourself and her. You try to bandage your arm. Dots of blood break apart the toilet paper in your hands.

“You need to be more aware of your surroundings,” your future self says, voice muffled. You can see the ghost of her toes in the crack beneath the door. “Any second can be the difference between life and death. Think of how foolish it would be, to be reading when the apocalypse comes and be instantly killed.”

She is stronger than you, and cleverer; you think that she could find a way through it if she tried. But tonight, she does not try. You do not know what you would do if she did.

But perhaps you are learning something for your future self after all. You are crafty now. Even with the shock of the dart hitting you, you did not drop your book.

It is from your mother’s collection, and like all her books, it has a muddled, polysyllabic, inscrutable title. At first you only understand one word in ten, then two, then three. No more than that, not yet, but that’s all right: After all, you’re taking Calc 3 now.

You jam a towel in the crack beneath the door, sit on the bathroom floor, and read until you think your future self has gone to sleep.

Two. And then a relief, or at least, an interesting new form of pain. Your future self increases your mileage too quickly, and now you have a fracture in the delicate bones of your foot. Your future self looks horrified when the pediatrician you still see shows her the X-ray, no doubt embarrassed to recollect that she was ever so unskilled at running.

So she makes you swim instead. But swimming, you have decided, you like better. You like the liquid weight of water, heavy against all of your limbs, each ascending knob of your spine.

“It’s not, like, species-ending, is it? You aren’t the last human on earth?” you ask her while you swim. You misjudge a stroke; the water slips over your head, but even that is lovely. You listen to all the blood hum in your head.

Then there is air again, and sound.

“If you can talk, you aren’t swimming hard enough,” your future self says. She is sitting by the edge of the pool, flipping through a cooking magazine your mother picked up in some waiting room, doubtless seduced by the promise of cheap weeknight dinners, only to set it aside when the recipes still took an hour to make. Reading them is the only recreation you have ever seen your future self partake in. She stares at the false images of food: carrots lacquered with hair spray. Meat glossy and dripping with motor oil, to make it catch the light.

You shy away from what this tells you about her.

“I just don’t understand why you can’t tell me what terrible thing is going to happen,” you say. “Won’t I prepare better if I know?”

“No,” she says. “It will only make you dread what is coming. Dread makes you useless, and useless people die young. Believe me.”

You wonder if she has any friends, in her cold, distant present that is your future. You haven’t spoken to your friends since your mother died. You don’t know what you would say.

One. Each pain has an equal: the pain of knitting skin back together. The knife-edge of the tweezers when she makes you pick the gravel from your knees. The way disinfectant stings so brightly it’s almost a sound, when you slip it across broken skin. The constant pressure of bandages, which she teaches you to wrap. It works better than the toilet paper did, but it feels disturbingly like someone’s hand, closed too tightly around your arm.

The two of you become regulars at the community health center, where you take all the first aid classes available, even the ones you have to pay for.

“Just think of the Bee Gees!” your instructor chirps. “Sing it with me. Ha, ha, ha, ha—”

You have to bite down on a laugh when you see the revulsion on your future self’s face. In the apocalypse, you think, in her voice that is also yours, you must be able to give efficient CPR without the aid of the Bee Gees.

There is a catastrophically awful day when you come home from school, and there is a sewing kit on the kitchen table. For a freezing moment, you think she will make you practice stitches on yourself, and you wonder how much it would hurt to run on a fractured foot.

Then she sits at the table and rolls up her sleeve.

She is a real person. She feels pain. You can feel her feel it, in the tiny changes of muscles, the length of her exhale, when you lay the first, clumsy stitch into her skin. But you only know it because you are also in pain. You recognize it in her.

She tolerates it better than you do. What would be a scream for you escapes her as a sigh. She is a better runner than you, more attentive in your shared first aid class. When the apocalypse comes, you do not know how you are supposed to do anything better than she did.

Three things you can hear

Three. Your own voice, hollow in your skull, pool water caressing your ears. “I think this is probably a paradox. Like the one about grandfathers. If you change me now, then I’m never going to become you. Or—something like that.”

Two. Her voice, parting through the waters like a chime. “You should stop reading your mother’s papers about time paradoxes,” she says. Stroke, stroke, your arms ago. Slip, slip, turn her pages. “I don’t think it’s a good coping mechanism.”

You can feel the ache in your teeth, how much you hate hearing her say that. “You’re right,” you say. “I should travel back in time and torture my past self instead,” and you know you aren’t her yet, because the flash of hurt you see in her eyes hurts you, too.

One. Sometimes, when your head is underwater, you think you hear a clock, faintly ticking in the background. Tinnitus, your counselor calls it, just another thing that only exists in your head.

You don’t even know what it’s ticking to, except to the same place that all clocks tick to: the future. Your future self’s present, always in your thoughts, but also all the little futures in between: finishing school, going to college. Even just going to the pool tomorrow. You don’t know when your present ends and your future self’s present begins.

The sound ticks out all your worries, marching endlessly in your brain. Tick. You check the news between each class at school, searching for zombies, nuclear war, but it hasn’t happened yet. Tick. On the school computer, where there’s no chance your future self will discover your morbid Googling and make you stop, you discover, disturbingly, that you can have genetic risk for intracranial aneurysms. You have not gotten far enough in biology to know where that leaves you, and there is no one you can ask now. Tick. Your guidance counselor asks you why you’ve quit all your extracurriculars, why you’re acting like you don’t want to go to college, and it’s not like you can tell her your mother died, so you don’t say anything at all.

Tick. It’s louder at night, so sometimes, instead of sleeping, you creep down into your mother’s office and read her papers, even though your future self told you not to. These papers are, impossibly, all that’s left of your mother. Except for your future self. Except for you.

You read about the ontological paradox, or an information loop. A time traveler receives something—a locket, a letter, a secret—and then travels back in time to give it to the person who gave it to them. So the letter is never written, the secret is never conceived of, no one slips the old photograph into the locket. It is a circle that loops back into itself, endlessly passing around a joined beginning and terminus that it never reaches.

You read about the grandfather paradox, where a time traveler comes back in time and kills their own grandfather. Only then they are never born, and so their grandfather is never killed. Only then they kill him again. On and on, like a coin spinning on its edge, like a clock ticking away minutes that never reach the hour. Loops and loops that never resolve, that are impossible to lay to rest, that haunt themselves endlessly.

It feels like your days fall in loops now. You swim at the Y as soon as you wake. Slam through the fastest shower and most nutrient-dense breakfast you can. If you’re running late, your future self will drive you to school.

You read your mother’s papers under your desk, propped up against the paper bag your future self packs you for lunch, while your friends exchange puzzled looks at the table you used to share with them. Then your future self is waiting for you in the parking lot, where she takes you back to the pool, or a rock climbing gym, or the advanced first aid class she signed you both up for. Or, sometimes, to therapy, where your counselor tries to convince you that the future may not be so bad after all.

You don’t know how to explain to your future self that you have homework, hours of it, chapters and practice tests and group projects and the ACT. College prep and pep rallies, and texts accruing on your phone like layers of dead skin, from friends who want to know if you’re dead, and you can’t call them back because if you did, you would immediately burst into tears, and you wouldn’t be able to tell them why.

“Calculus does not matter during the apocalypse,” your future self tells you. It is one of your frequent fights, when she catches you doing Calc 3 homework instead of learning to tie strong knots. “You only go to that school because you’re too young to legally stop.”

“Fuck the apocalypse,” you tell her. Something animal in your brain tells you you’re trapped in a corner, but for once, you don’t believe it. “I’m not doing everything you say, just because you say something bad is going to happen!”

She slaps her hand down on the table, and you can’t help it, you flinch. She knows how much you hate loud sounds. She’s ended arguments like this before.

“You don’t get how lucky you have it,” she says, and her voice is like a hand hitting the table again. “School, textbooks, friends—hell, even packaged food and running water—all of this is going to go away. They don’t last. But knowing how to run—how to fight—how to stop bleeding and infection—you’re going to wish you knew that someday.”

You don’t know how to fight with yourself. There’s something bright and defiant humming in your ears, but you don’t know how to articulate it. You’re not my mom, you want to say, but it’s worse than that.

So you go outside instead. You think about slamming the door, but you’re pretty sure that would hurt you more than her. You sit on the edge of your porch, huff in and out hot breaths, look up at a sky with too much light pollution to see the stars. You think about how even if you were one of them, constantly consumed by flaming gases, calculus would still be the exact same. The study of continuous change.

Two things you know about your future self

Two. Something bad happened to her, which means that something bad is going to happen to you. You’d like to think that she’s lying, that she made the apocalypse up for the sheer pleasure of torturing you, but you don’t think that’s true. She won’t tell you exactly what the apocalypse is, but you think you can see it in her eyes, in the shape of everything she makes you learn.

When disaster strikes, you must be able to run away. You must know how to use a knife and climb trees. You must know how to go without food. You must know how to kill a snake, how to clean a fish, how to sew shut a wound.

You must know how to breathe slowly, in little circles, to make your brain stop being scared long enough to do something about it. That one you know well. You practice it every day.

In your personal taxonomy of disasters, there are too many possibilities. They flit beneath your eyes, you hear them stepping closer in the ticking that echoes endlessly in your ears, as the threat of the apocalypse circles above you like a vulture. Never quite arriving. You, never free of being frightened that it will. Catastrophizing, your counselor calls it: believing that everything ends badly always.

You don’t want to live like this, but you don’t know how to escape it. Sometimes at night, through your adjoining bedroom walls, you pretend that you can’t hear your future self crying.

One. She loves you. You wish she didn’t, but she does. It’s why you don’t tell your counselor that she’s right, or use your incredible new mile time to run away. Because she loves you so helplessly, and she wouldn’t understand. It would be like kicking a dog. It would only limp back, still loving you.

You have dreams, terribly, each night since she came, formless dreams of mushroom clouds, streets clogged with corpses, a wave sweeping over you, only you have forgotten how to swim, how to run. Each night in your dreams, you try to scream, and sleep wraps around your mouth like a bandage, gluing it shut.

Only one night you must manage it, because you wake up in a rush, your future self’s hand gentle on your arm.

You stare at her for a wild moment, like she is the sleep paralysis demon, the restless ghost, that lurks in the corner of your room. In the darkness, you don’t see her grey hairs, the quiet lines at the corner of her eyes. Only her face, your face, hovering above you in the dark.

“I’m not going to be you,” you say. The words feel like vomit, burning on the way out. “This has to be a paradox. What if we keep doing the same things, again and again? You change me, so you never exist, so I never changed? What if we’re just repeating and repeating the same loop?”

“We haven’t done this before,” your future self says. “Or—your mother could explain it better than me. In our life, we only experience this twice. Your half, and then mine.” Her voice in the darkness is tired. You wonder if you woke her up or if, like you, she always has trouble sleeping.

“But how do you know?” you say, and your voice sounds younger than ever in the dark.

She smooths her fingertips across your arm, where the last marks from the darts have not faded yet. You want to scream at her. She gave you those bruises. She does not get to be kind about them now.

“Because I remember this happening,” she says. “Bits of it, at least. It was a long time ago for me. But I don’t believe that we’re in a time loop. I wish we were. If we really had an infinite number of chances, then maybe one of these times, I would figure out what I’m supposed to do.”

Your counselor likes to say that pain is something genetic. It is familial. You inherit it from your parents and pass it to your children, on and on until someone lays it to rest, exorcises it. But you did not inherit this pain from your mother. Your mother loved you, lightly and in a way that left no bruises.

The pain passed between you and your future self has no etiology. You do not know how to feel it, how to suffer it, how to lay it to rest without understanding where it came from.

And it has to be a paradox. Because you will remember forever what it feels like, to haunt a house at the same time as someone you are afraid of. You will remember this moment, and this one, all the little moments ticking forward to something terrible, except that something terrible is already happening. You aren’t going to abandon the person you are now. Nothing the future contains could persuade you to do so.

“I just want you to survive,” your future self says. It’s too dark to see her expression. Her voice sounds brittle, like she’s crying. “I just want you to be okay. Not just because you’re me.”

She’s the only person you have now. You hate yourself for loving her a little, too.

One thing you know about yourself

One. You don’t think you can fall back asleep after that. But you must, because you dream again. You dream that your future self never came. There is junk food in the pantry, the TV hums with abstracted background sound, and your mother has toed out of her pumps at the front door.

It’s such a white-knuckled, delirious relief that you drift upstairs, certain you will be able to sleep. But when you arrive, there is someone already in your bed, snarled up in the blankets.

It’s you. But this you is younger than you or your future self. This you is so young you smell different, like you only just left the cradle. Even as you watch, your face pinches, as if you, too, are dreaming.

You understand why parents panic if they lose sight of their children in the park. You feel an animal rush of awareness that this baby is like a raw yolk, skinned of eggshell. No armor yet. Soft all the way through.

The ticking is in your ears again, more unbearable than ever. You think of opening the door for your future self, of letting her make you tea, not telling your counselor, not taking any of your friends’ calls. You think of grandfathers and genetic risk and secrets with no origins, ghosts waiting to come until someone is dead. You think of having something in your head that’s going to kill you someday, and not knowing it yet.

The ticking is so loud now that it’s a single hum.

You want to protect yourself. No one has ever taught you how.

You lean over.

“Something bad is going to happen,” you whisper to the baby in the bed. “Someone bad is coming. Here is what you need to survive.”

[Editor’s Note: Publication of this story was made possible by a gift from Alexander Langer and Marika Bailey during our annual Kickstarter.]

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: Britt Camm

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors