The sun is high overhead above this pink beach. I slather some more sunblock on my face and arms and plod over the sand back to our camp area for the umbrella I made by tying fern fronds to a long branch. It’s still a work in progress seeing as how it doesn’t stand upright. Our real umbrella, the rainbow beach one we lifted a few universes back, washed out to sea two days ago thanks to yours truly. Yusuf said I didn’t anchor it into the sand right and I lost my shit about how jesus christ there’s more than one way to do things. He clammed up after that. I’m really not proud of my reaction and I know he wasn’t trying to nag but we’d been bickering a lot by then. That night a gust of wind launched the umbrella out of the sand and into the surf. I chased it, naked, into the water, and floundered while the tide swept it out to sea.

Yusuf had the unbelievable grace not to say “I told you so” when I heaved back to our air mattress, shivering with exhaustion and clumped with seaweed. I try stabbing the frond umbrella into the sand, now, and end up stomping it to dried fern bits when it tips over. I really don’t deserve him. Or didn’t, I guess, since he’s gone.

I recorded a lot of Yusuf’s tutoring sessions with Scarlett back on the Compound. We’d be lying in his bed and I’d say, “Tell me about electrons.” Or, “Tell me about gravitational lenses again,” when I just wanted to hear him talk. The way his voice cranks up when he’s so lit up by whatever he’s explaining and excited that I want to hear it. The way he’ll stop and laugh, sometimes, saying how I was looking at him made him feel special. I wish I could drop into our home universe and find the camera from my room just so I can replay those days and watch us fall in love all over again.

I recorded some bits with Junior here. Me and Yusuf on a Ferris wheel with cotton-candy pink lights reflecting in his eyes, both of us lost in Neo Cairo’s neon maze of streets—him pointing at a street sign and laughing because damnit, weren’t we just here?— in a world where Ramses II had discovered the Envisioner. His tomb in the Valley of the Kings and Queens featured paintings of a strange giant spider that looked like it was made of the night sky. Wide-eyed nutjobs on TV said it was proof of ancient technology, lost to time, that the Egyptians used to build the pyramids, while scholars rolled their eyes and said the paintings were of a primordial creation god.

I’ll try to remember some things Yusuf told me without footage to back me up.