Status Updates From The Unforgettable Lives of ...

Oh Alice 🫂

Some of her knowledge was decades ahead of its time, and she had to be careful not to sound too certain about things that weren’t yet proven. But she did what she could, planting seeds that she hoped would grow into healthier habits.

What would this life be like? She had saved her father, but would he stay saved? In her second life, she had postponed his death by two years, only to lose him to a heart attack. Was that fate? Was there some cosmic force that demanded Blake Carr’s death, no matter what she did to prevent it?

Ooh.. I have a couple theories 🫦 :(

“That’s the sign of a good book. The ones that stick with you.”

No one asked about her plans anymore. It reminded her of a joke she had read once, which said that being an adult was stupid, because no one ever asked what your favorite dinosaur was.

Gunnar put his arm around her. “Maybe the point isn’t where you end up. Maybe the point is how you feel when you get there.”

Larkin nodded, but she had other thoughts that she kept to herself. She didn’t tell him that sometimes the memories of her first life still overwhelmed her. She would be sitting in her office in the library, a song would come on, and she would immediately be thrown back into the day .

She thought about her first life, how she’d made the wrong choice for the wrong reasons and spent decades regretting it. Was she about to make the same mistake again? Or was this different because the reasons were different?

She didn’t know. All she knew was that her mother needed her, and she couldn’t walk away from that.

They went to their old bedrooms and tried to sleep. Larkin lay awake for a long time, staring at the ceiling and thinking about the life she’d been building in Eugene. The journalism classes. The student newspaper. The possibility of becoming someone other than the girl who stayed in Middle Falls and never left.

“Change is hard. Loss is hard. But standing still is harder. We can’t freeze time. We can’t stay in this moment no matter how much we might want to. All we can do is remember where we came from and use those memories to help us figure out where we’re going."

She sat cross-legged on the end of the bed. She had thought about this moment, considered it, and tried to plan it for years. Now that it was here, she still didn’t have a great idea about how to proceed, but something inside told her that this was the moment.

It occurred to her that it didn’t take long for things to fall apart.

😞😓

She thought about all the other changes she might make in this life. All the ways she might try to fix things, to make things better. Every change could have consequences she couldn’t predict. Every action could ripple outward in ways she couldn’t control.

How was she supposed to know what to change and what to leave alone?

The street outside was peaceful, Christmas lights twinkling up and down the block.

Her father was alive. That was what mattered. That was what she’d come back for.

But the cost of that choice weighed on her like a physical thing.

She didn’t know if she’d made the right choice. She didn’t know if there even was a right choice in a situation like this.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She couldn’t change what had happened. She could only move forward from here.

And from this point on, everything would be different. Every day from now on would be uncharted territory.

Crossing fingers Lark!