8.

Images surround me, moving all around me, and within these images I see certain things. I see the friends who have helped me, both of them but each of them individually. I see that fishing vessel, that guy Alex. I see the hospital, the older nurse. I see the hotel where I had a drink with Linda. I see the room we shared. I see her smile.

It is as if I could just pick a scenario and just go be in it, just like that. Is this for real? It's one heck of a dream if it isn't

This whole situation knocks me to my ass. The spinning has stopped. Somehow, I am no longer in that darkened warehouse but rather sitting on my ass on a beach on what appears to be a hot and bright summer's day.

I stand up and have a sudden realisation. With what I had told myself as in what my older self has told me, wouldn't it be safe to assume that he has somehow sent me to that beach, to that moment where I come across the large clear bottle containing that memory stick.

I did say I wanted to go back to the beginning. He just ensured that I did. I look around my surroundings and sure enough I am not far from that bottle, even more than that I can see my younger alternate approaching, not hugely younger of course, as it is still only a matter of months for me since all this began.

Right, I am going to have to get out of the way of the other me but before I do, I have a decision to make. Do I take the bottle with the memory stick with me? Prevent my other self from finding it? Or do I leave it for myself to find? That's a heck of a question. If I leave it, then I know what my younger self is about to go through and if I allow that then I am taking a step closer to becoming that older me.

I do not want that but if I take the bottle then I am creating a number of paradox's, I'm sure? Including resetting all I have been through since coming across that bottle and its contents, but that's the point, right? Preventing myself from finding that bottle hits some kind of reset button and the current version of me will no longer exist. Or does it?

If I remove the bottle then the original path I was on once again exists, a path that still leads me to create a message in bottle, a message which goes back in time anyway. So, am I supposed to find this bottle? No, there must once have been a point where I hadn't, so I'd imagine. My head ... uh.

Maybe I have done this before, when I did find that large clear bottle was there another version of me hiding close by, watching every move I made? After all, that moment when I lived it, had a familiar feel about it. This is all too strange, too strange indeed. I think I may need therapy of some sort.

What would you do? In this position would you leave the bottle right there where it is? Or would you take it and hide elsewhere with it? There is surely only one decision to make right? And it has to be made right? ... After all we do have all the time in world, right?

***

The heat of the day presses down on me as if trying to coax out an answer from my indecision. I stare at the bottle, the sun glinting off its surface with an ordinary innocence weighs so heavily with consequence. My footprints mark a hesitant path in the sand, circling the thing that has upended everything I thought I understood about cause and effect, about fate and free will.

I try to evaluate the risks, but the numbers have always been lies, haven't they? Time is not a straight line, not a ledger to balance, it's a maze, and every turn leads back to this beach, this bottle, this moment.

Is it cowardice to want to sever the chain, to not let my past self just walk into the web of all that was and could be again, to prevent him from stumbling through the confusion and pain? Nothing cowardly here, two choices, two paths, both of which circle right back to here. It's futile, right?

Would it a mercy, the chance to spare myself from becoming that older, colder version I met in the warehouse? Yet, if I don't take the bottle, like I did before, I erase my own current existence, unravel my memories thread by thread until there's nothing left but the shimmer of possibility on the surface of the sea.

I glance over my shoulder, something I've got so used to doing, and I can see the other me, the younger me, approaching, getting closer by the second. The stride is uncertain but hopeful, oblivious to the trap, oblivious to the loop. I want to shout, to warn myself, but my voice catches in my throat. Would he even listen? Would I have listened? Could he understand any of it?

The thoughts of potential paradoxes gnaw at me. If I intervene, do I condemn both of us? Or do I merely fulfil the role I've been written into, an actor in a farce designed by another, older version of myself? Still condemning us both. The sun continues to drop, shadows lengthen, and I feel the weight of all the selves who have stood here before haunted, undecided, forced to choose, unaware of the choice.

Indeed, what would you do, if you were me? Would you deny your past self the agony and the mystery, or would you trust them to find their own way, to make their own mistakes? If only I could pass this decision to someone else.

I step back, breath held, senses sharp as the click between moments. I imagine hiding the bottle, burying it deep, casting it far into the surf. Or perhaps smashing it, ending the cycle with a single decisive act. But with each possibility there will spawn new complications, new timelines that might be better, might be worse. But don't they all already exist?

The other me is closer now, pausing to look out at the water off in the distance, as if sensing another presence. I realize, suddenly, that I am not invisible. Out here, under this indifferent sky, there is no hiding from myself.

I reposition the bottle gently on the sand, exactly where it was meant to be found among the seaweed covered mound of sand. I step away, leaving almost no trace, heart pounding with resignation, with hope, with the endless ache of possibility.

Across the years, maybe mercy is not in the prevention, but in the letting go. In trusting that, no matter how many times the bottle returns to shore, something within us is always changed. Its exact arrival is from a further point in time than what I had come back from, bottle intact of course despite the fact I've smashed it. But I haven't ... yet.

There were the thoughts of smashing the bottle when I first came across it, but I haven't, I didn't, not here at least, it had been smashed in my past which right here is a moment yet to happen. I am yet to discover it, so I have yet to smash it despite having experienced such a thing.

I disappear into the dunes, the memories already slipping, the world bright and strange. And behind me, a younger version of myself stoops to collect the bottle, the cycle unbroken, the story spinning ever onward. There must be another point where I just walk on by ... I'll have this decision to make again.

All the time in the world maybe, just maybe, that's enough.