The Future of Another Timeline

That’s when I decided the point of travel was not to observe history, but to change it.

Sometimes I think going to college is kind of like dying. You’re this one kind of person, with all different interests, but then you have to cut those off and become somebody totally different.

I remember abortion being legal in the United States

If you have property, you can’t be property.

Sherry’s looked like something the peasants would have trashed during the French Revolution.

was certain would be my completely grown-up middle school self. I had been such a conformist back then. I filed my nails into perfect parabolas and wore tiny bathing suits, and squeezed lemon juice onto my head in the hot sun to bring out the blond streaks in my hair. I wore pearls with my preppy blouses and was absolutely convinced that if I could lose five pounds, I would finally be pretty. But then Lizzy and I discovered punk rock.

Outside the sun was drowning in a Technicolor bruise of pollution, but inside we ate spaghetti and my mom made small talk.

When Glorious stopped singing, I missed her magnificent sound, with its power to merge my soul with the crowd and obliterate loneliness. I was stuck in a body. I had to communicate using the pathetic phonemes of language. Suddenly my throat hurt and my eyes were burning and I had to swallow hard to keep myself from breaking down right there in front of every punk rocker in Irvine. This was always happening to me—something random would make me want to cry. But it had gotten a lot worse lately. It was harder to stop the tears before they fell.

I tried to hold on to the pre-encore rush but felt myself returning to a baseline of sadness. Maybe the concert had been pretty good, but I still hated everything.

Collective action means that when someone does something small or personal, their actions can change history too.

You change a man’s mind by showing him a good time.

But as I’d told Anita before, my pain didn’t seem to come from holding those two histories in my mind. It was from holding two sets of feelings. The Tess whose best friend committed suicide knew who she was. She had a purpose. The Tess whose best friend lived felt … ambivalent about herself. Not all the time. She was happy, but always also sad about something. She’d built a new identity around an almost unbearable ambiguity, and the gradual realization that she would never be perfectly good or principled. This Tess would always know she had done bad things, and suffered the consequences. That was the awful new feeling scraping the inside of my skull: my best friend, whom I loved more than anyone at the time, had rejected me personally rather than rejecting life itself.