In the end, Donnie was able to save our realities and fix the multiverse, and I moved back home and got a sales job at the Apple store. I saw Donnie on the news last Christmas, his video already gone viral, the two small mice meeting each other again, their pink noses touching. There was Donnie with his new assistant, a guy who looked exactly like me, just more clean-cut and trustworthy. The YouTube clip already has more than a billion views, and the world is soon going to become way more complicated. Maybe in a dozen years I’ll have access to those programs I once wrote, and I’ll be able to return to the night when I left our apartment drunk, stoned, and stupid enough to search for another Erin. I’ll tell myself to go home, to stop smoking so much weed, and to try to fix our relationship instead. Who knows if I’ll listen, but I can at least try. Because I know there are countless timelines where I’m someone good, parallel universes where I make the right choices and no one gets hurt, infinite realities where I’m a better human being. And maybe, if I try hard enough, one of those realities can also be this one.

MOUNTAIN SONG

That autumn, the robins and blue jays began filling walkways and roads, flapping aimlessly when I passed. They’d stopped building nests in the trees, and come October, the skies weren’t filled with migrating geese. Instead, I watched them hang around our neighborhood for far too long. They began wandering cul-de-sacs and roaming in groups through shopping center parking lots as if searching for lost goslings. Specialists speculated the Towers were scrambling their internal compasses, but no one could say for sure. Then the storms came, the birds all froze, and the city removed them with the snow. It was heartbreaking, and if it weren’t for urban aviculturists, raising doves and owls in underground aviaries, we’d have lost them all. But we seem to rise to the challenge in amazing ways. We avert doomsday visions, and the saviors keep birdsong alive for us. Still, it gives me pause, particularly when the humming throbs behind my eardrums, and I sense the interface inside me which has yet to fully open its eyes. It’s nothing to worry about, I’ve told my parents. We’re in the early stages; they’re working on it.

Question: It’s been almost two years since I talked to my parents. Is it right to still be angry at them?

Another parent question. It’s pretty much all I get on my thinkstream now, ever since my thought-piece had its minor success. More than a hundred thousand users paid for my extended idea “Healing the Rift,” and I got a lot of followers downloading my other thoughts.