FAR FROM ERIS • FreenBecky •

FORTY - SIX

Patty's blood froze. Freen remembered. Although perhaps she couldn't put an order to the images, although she couldn't put it into words, the girl had everything for the pieces to fit together at any moment. She looked at Becky, still standing by her side, and wondered how much time that happiness radiating from her had left. But she shouldn't intervene, she hadn't done so in five years and couldn't do it now. Would either of them believe her? How to begin to unravel something that is inexplicable? Something that is incomprehensible? How to tell someone who has believed a truth for years that is not true, and how to convince a person that the reason that destroyed her is not part of her world?

Not even she believed it at the time, but Patty had grown up in a house where the inexplicable always ended up hanging on a wall surrounded by equations and mathematical formulas, so when the day finally came when she heard Freen's version of what happened on the bridge, she felt that something didn't fit. Far from that version given by the psychiatrists that Freen had hallucinated, Patty knew there was more.

She searched for hours through the boxes where she still kept her mother's diaries, her notes, her annotations filled with data incomprehensible to most people, but not to Patty. And it took a long time until she found what she was looking for.

Synchronicity. That was the exact word. Her mother had spent years studying that phenomenon, completely convinced that if two events occurred exactly at the same time in two parallel realities, they could trigger an extreme vibration of the fabric of the universe, turning it into something as thin as silk, as transparent as glass.

When Patty found Freen at the clinic, at first she thought the doctors were right. The girl was totally destroyed, consumed by a depression linked to many other names. But that didn't fit with the story Becky had told her months before. She had gone to the bridge with the intention of taking her own life, yes, but she didn't. And Becky left that bridge with that girl, had a hot chocolate with her, and they said goodbye. That's all. However, Freen was in a state of post-traumatic shock triggered by what happened that night, and although she couldn't give too many details, she was sure that girl had jumped in front of her eyes. In fact, at the clinic, they confirmed that version given by her best friend: Nam, who received the phone call from Freen saying that a girl had just jumped from the Eris bridge. How could there be two versions of the same story? Which one of them was lying? Did any of them lie, perhaps? Patty asked herself so many questions during those days that her head wanted to leave her shoulders.

She talked to Becky again and asked her for details. Not about how she felt, or how Freen was, but about the details. Becky at first thought the old lady was bored and rambling, but still the information she gave was very helpful. That lightbulb bursting, that change in the sound of the river, that variation in temperature. Details that only fueled her suspicions that something out of the ordinary had happened on that bridge.

Sometimes emotional events are so strong and so powerful that they alter reality. After all, we are made of atoms, of molecules. The whole universe is built in the same way, and everything is susceptible to its variations, and there are few events more determining in the universe than death. Dying alters the universal fabric in a way that we are not able to understand, and yet, thousands of people die every day and the world doesn't collapse. So why did the death of that girl jumping off the bridge cause this? Patty couldn't stop turning over and over why this time, and not the others. And then she understood: it was the decision to die.

Two girls. Two parallel realities. Two universes, and the same decision: to die. That was what caused synchronicity. What probability was there that two versions of the same person would decide to take their own lives at the same time? That certainly wasn't in her mother's notes, and yet, Patty deduced that that had weakened the fabric of reality so much that what was here was no longer, and what was there wasn't either. And by twists of fate, there was Freen, walking on that bridge at the precise moment when those two versions of Becky were about to jump into nothingness. Two versions of Becky. Two versions of Freen. Two strangers coinciding in the space-time of a different reality, seeing through a window the consequences of a decision that altered the universe and dragged them into a rewritten destiny for them.

And it's because one Becky did die that night, but it wasn't Becky.

And one Freen did save her. But it wasn't Freen.

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