Last year, this same time happened to fall on a new moon. It was also the day I regained consciousness in a hospital bed. So I marked that date on my calendar as my death anniversary.
I am, in these parts of life, the kind of person who clings to ritual in a way that probably looks strange to everyone else. These rituals may have no practical value at all, and their logic likely makes sense only to me. But what I want to remember is simple: on that day, in that year, I almost died. Everything that came afterward sometimes feels as if it belongs to a different version of me, one who continued living on another branch of an "if."
A long time ago, I had an idea for a novel. Its protagonist wanders through a world made of alternate possibilities, searching for a storyline in which he can stay alive. But each storyline can contain only one version of himself. If he wants to remain in any given branch, he has to push the original self in that world into making a decision that breaks from its destined "if," forcing that other self out so he can take that place instead.
The problem is that every "if" splits again and again. Even if each fork begins as a fifty-fifty divide, the farther the branches spread, the farther they drift from his original destination. So all he can do is keep searching for the branch that comes closest to what he first wanted.
And once he starts interfering, the storylines grow unstable. In branches altered by his choices, duplicate selves begin to appear. Those timelines split again, overlap again, and collapse into further confusion. He loses the original path entirely and ends up wandering through a damaged labyrinth of possibilities.
In that world of "ifs," his selves divide into two camps. One side is aggressive, expansionist, determined to survive in any storyline at any cost; for them, to preserve themselves, another self must be struck down. The other side is gentle and conservative—cowardly, insecure, always compromising with the fate arranged for them by others. But over time they realize they are the ones being pushed toward the edge. They are the selves destined to receive the bad endings. So they begin to resist.
Then war breaks out in this world of possibilities: the invaders against the cautious, highly rational conservatives, all fighting over whichever branch appears to promise the better future.
Only after being dragged into that war does the one who caused it understand that he may have made an irreparable mistake. In the beginning, his goal had been almost embarrassingly simple. He only wanted to live. He had happened to experience the worst ending in one possible world, and because he refused to submit to fate as something fixed, he made what seemed like a rational choice.
I never figured out how that story should end. I abandoned it halfway, or maybe it abandoned me. I have always suspected that to really understand a story like that, a person has to live through at least one truly wrong choice first. It is similar to the way people talk about time travel: the idea that even with a time machine, fate might remain unchangeable. And that leaves me wondering—if destiny is already fixed, but the person inside it can still choose which side of an "if" branch to walk down, does that make destiny something that can, in fact, be changed?
I had originally imagined writing the novel almost like a game of ideas, something in the spirit of a constructed speculative world. But on the branch where that book was supposed to be written, I myself ended up walking into the "if" where it would no longer happen. The writing of it can wait.
What brought the old idea back to me was that I once gave myself a premise: if I lived through one wrong "if," would I then understand life—and this planned novel—more deeply? After what happened last year, after that personal "death anniversary," it feels as if I did step onto another branch. There is even a version of the thought in which the original me already died somewhere on a different offshoot, and the one alive now is merely the self that split off at that moment and kept going.
It is not a particularly useful thought. It is a little romantic, maybe, but romance does not put food on the table.
In the period just after I woke up in the hospital, I was almost constantly talking, thinking, crying. Whenever my emotions spilled over and I started crying uncontrollably, I would joke to my wife that it was my liver detoxing. It was not exactly that I wanted to cry. It felt more like a release—a strange emotional discharge from something that had been suppressed for too long and had finally reached a form I could barely control.
During the worst days of the illness, I drifted in and out of a half-conscious state, trapped in nightmare after nightmare, each one beyond my control. Some looked like apocalyptic Hollywood disaster films. In one, I was alone on a spaceship with its energy exhausted, simply waiting for death. In another, my body was twisted through a tunnel of time, distorted by space itself and wracked with unbearable pain. In one of the strangest of them all, I even grabbed Meng Po at the entrance to the Bridge of No Return and ran.
I still remember those nightmares clearly. They may remain a kind of pain and fear that can never be erased from my life. But there is another feeling mixed into them too: a dark sort of pleasure, because one day they may become an unnoticed scene inside something I write.
That is why I left a reminder on my calendar that says: 🎂 Happy Death Anniversary.
I do not actually want to forget those painful memories. They deserve to be carved into my work.
When I had just woken up, sleep was difficult for a long time. Every night I was afraid the nightmares would return. But alongside that fear was another strange amusement: I began playing a private game with myself about "ifs." What if those dreams kept repeating because somewhere a certain decision had been made? What if each nightmare belonged to another self in another branch of possibility?
Maybe those other selves are still there even now, still enduring those same terrible dreams. Maybe, on that branch, they chose the better ending for me and kept the endless suffering for themselves. But the past can no longer be changed. All we can do is continue down our separate storylines, none of them entirely right or wrong.
Remembering those dreams is also a way of mourning the other versions of me—those already dead, and those still trapped somewhere in an "if," reliving the nightmare over and over.