he morning I die, I am already late for a meeting I don't want to be in.
The scooter's horn bleats like an offended pigeon as I thread between cars, a precision that used to make me proud and now only makes my heart feel like a dropped ping-pong ball. My AirPods blare a managerial podcast where a man with a perfect haircut explains how to make quarterly goals "feel soulful." The city smells like rain-steamed coffee and hot asphalt—San Francisco being perennially damp, like a hoodie with ideas.
I built the product roadmap that got us a decent seed raise and an investor who wore cufflinks the size of memory chips. I'm supposed to be proud. Instead I'm tired down to the bone. I haven't called my sister in two months. My mom sent a text asking if I'm eating. I sent a thumbs-up emoji because it was faster than truth.
At the intersection by the co-working hub, old habits take over: speed, small margins, absolute confidence. A delivery van brakes hard. My scooter slips on a patch of diesel-slick asphalt. The world goes quiet in the way a crowd size goes quiet when the microphone dies—sudden, like a missing click on a recorder. I have three pure thoughts before everything goes wrong: fix the handlebars, don't spill the coffee, call Mom back.
Then there is brightness, not painful, more like stage lights recognizing you. For a beat I am in a white room with more possibilities than I can carry. Then I am back in my body, but younger, a feeling like wearing a sweater you forgot you owned and fit in again.
I wake up on a grimy couch in a dump of an apartment that used to feel glamorous when rent was cheaper and dreams were easier. The ceiling fan is oscillating too slowly. My phone on the coffee table has a cracked screen, and the wallpaper is a photo of me and Danny in matching graduation caps, faces full of hope. The time reads 7:12 a.m. I'm disoriented long enough to think I overslept for an interview I never wanted.
But the weirdest thing is the smell: teen laundry detergent. And then—because memory is a traitor—I see my hands and realize they're smaller. Lighter. Scarless.
I bolt upright. My head swims with a flood of knowledge that should have been impossible: product launch dates, a bug in the backend that will bankrupt us if unchecked, the exact words my investor will say when he smiles at me in Q3. All those things I had sweated over, rehearsed, cursed in the dark—they are mine. They are also suddenly yesterday.
"Yoga?" a voice calls from the kitchen. It is a voice I know intimately and avoid on purpose: Maya Rivera, who can make a whiteboard look like a confession booth. She stands in the doorway with a mug and a bewildered expression, as if she has just walked into a room where someone has rearranged the furniture of history.
"Uh—" My throat does a thing. "Maya?"
She laughs, half-relieved. "You sound like a ghost. You okay, Alex? You were supposed to be at