The Choice That Made Me

Morning arrived without certainty.
It called itself morning, at least.

I stood by the window, vast, encircling the house like an eye that never closed. Light entered too quickly, as if the day had skipped its own beginning. A sunrise already exhausted, chased by a sunset that came too soon.

I drove an old Volkswagen van through hollowed mountains. The land was empty, ancient. The sun slipped downward, and the fractures in the rock burned, thin veins of fluorescent fire, as if the earth were remembering something molten.

My hands began to shake.
Panic set in.

When I returned home, the air had shifted its weight. I was no longer aligned with myself. I wore unfamiliar clothes, short, careless, out of place, and men in passing old Fiats stared as if I belonged to another decade.

Was I still me?
Was this still time?

I understood without proof: I had slipped sideways.

I told my mother about the eclipse, the wrongness of the light. I told her we were not now anymore. We had fallen certainly into the 1980s. We would go to the cemetery, I said. Graves are honest. Dates do not lie. We dressed carefully, like for Sunday mass, like people who wanted to pass unnoticed by God.

The mountains gave way to cypress lines, and the cypress lines hardened into burial walls. Confirmation without relief. From the square we walked into a church, heavy with incense and memory.

My mother.
My brother, still a toddler.
My father, distant, blurred, as if already leaving.

I sat facing away from the altar. Everyone else looked forward, as if ready to be judged.

I realized something was wrong. I was sitting with my mother, yet I shouldn’t have been there at all. I asked her to move closer to the rest of the family.

When I sat beside her, I nearly fell off the bench, as though there wasn’t space meant for me. I spoke, my mother could hear me. My brother could too, though he was far too articulate for a toddler.

No one else noticed.

The perpetua approached. Asked my mother to read the Gloria. She declined. The woman replied gently, sharply: this error would be forgiven once. Never again.

Then clarity descended, not softly, but finally.

I could not be seen.

My uncle and cousin were there, younger versions of themselves, long before weight gain or baldness softened their faces. I understood then: only my mother could see me, and only my brother could hear me.

And then the truth struck, clean and irreversible.

I had not been born.

This was a world where my mother did not keep me.

I woke up shaking, drenched in sweat. I checked my body, breathing, alive.

I called my mother and thanked her from the deepest part of my heart. I thanked her for the choice she made at seventeen.

“Thank you for keeping me,” I said.

“Thank you for being you.”

Because somewhere, in another parallel universe, there is a version of my mother who was not as brave.

We carried the mark of judgment like a quiet bruise.

Eyes followed us.

Words lingered unspoken.

You felt more like a sister than a mother.

We grew up side by side, learning how to be alive together.

Thank you for being you.

Thank you for choosing me.