In one memory, I’m at a house party in Ann Arbor, talking to a guy who’s telling me about this new band called Blues Traveler. You walk by, and I know right away it’s you, though I have no idea at that point who you are. You turn to me in the hallway, and I can tell you recognize me too, though you have no idea who I am either. You ask me if I want to check out the party next door, and that’s how it begins—the story that ends with the two of us in Cairo during the Arab Spring.

In another of these memories, it’s the summer after my high school graduation, and I’m depressed about Kurt Cobain. I meet you in Golden Gate Park, sitting under a tree reading a book on civil disobedience. We share a cigarette, and that’s how it begins—the story that ends with the two of us at Standing Rock.

In a third memory, I’m tending bar in New York when you and your friends walk in. They’re a douchey contingency of young Republicans going on about Martha Stewart getting what she deserved, and you look embarrassed. When you step up to order a drink, I ask how you got mixed up with a crowd like that, and you laugh, and that’s how it begins—the story that ends with the two of us afloat in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch after the second Greenpeace ship was sunk.=

In these memories, I am always someone different, and you are someone different too, but there’s always something about you that’s the same. That’s how I always know it’s you.

My therapist reminds me that I spend all day obsessing over imaginary people and their imaginary lives. She tells me it’s one of the hazards of fiction: The conflation of the unreal and the real.

But I find it hard to believe I’ve imagined any of this. Because as soon as I began to remember, I realized I’d always known. That all of my novels were about me and you, every short story too; even the ones I wrote before I met you.

In my first book, we met in Eugene in 1977, at a punk show. We wound up being part of the stand-off with the Forest Service at Warner Creek, trying to save the last of the American old growth. We failed.

In my second novel, we met at the WTO protests in Seattle. You were a union leader, and I was an activist. We were trying to keep NAFTA from destroying the American middle class. We failed.

In my third novel, we met at the Occupy encampment in Zucotti Park. You were an investment banker who’d just walked out on his job, and I was serving Food Not Bombs. We kissed standing right there beside the rampaging bull, and Elizabeth Warren called us the future. We were trying to change the world.

We failed.

No matter the context, no matter our names, no matter the stories attached to us, it’s always me and you, doing our damnedest to avert what we both know—what we all know—is coming, trying to shift the weight of history. And somehow, we keep returning to this timeline.

I cannot help but imagine that the you that I met this time around—the you that taught that workshop at Pacific and encouraged my ambitions, the you who also wrote fictions oddly parallel to each other, and to mine—the you who are now gone from this timeline—I cannot help but imagine that you are, even now, stepping into a new life within what we termed the Access Point, that window of time, circa 1970 to 1995, in which a person being born might have a real shot at averting the collapse.

These kids who take my classes were born too late to do much about what’s coming down the line. But they don’t want to hear that.

They’re going to watch as all the animals in all the books they read as kids—about the rhino, the tiger, and even the elephant, not to mention the great whales—all wink out of existence.

But they don’t want to hear that either.

The elephant, gone the way of the T. Rex! Gone the way of the dodo. While people obsess about their property values, their wrinkles, their newfound inability to sustain an erection.

There are friends who imagine that your death has unhinged me. In reality, I’ve watched you die a thousand times. I understood this that night under the Perseids in Joshua Tree, the trip we were supposed to take and never did, which I took for us both instead. That you always somehow had the trick of lighting out before me, the way men do.

People ask why I keep returning to the same time period, why I keep circling back to these so-called failed movements, the same sorts of characters, the same sorts of tropes in my work. What they don’t realize is that a bed of coals can still spark a fire.

What they don’t realize is that they’re still living in a time when it might be possible to avert the worst of what’s to come.

What they don’t realize is that they’re living in time, and also what Patti Smith said: “Time matters.”

You’re gone now, just another Black man gunned down on the street, no matter your advanced degrees, your awards, your hard-won tenure. And maybe—maybe—I really have lost my mind.

I keep thinking about you, the last time I saw you. You looked at me and said, “Don’t give up. Don’t do that.” And I felt the force of your ancestors behind it, the way they strove against injustice, and survived to deliver you to this time, to encourage me, and so many others, to become who we really were, and maybe always had been—to encourage us to change the world.

And maybe, behind them, I felt those others too. All those other you’s.

I suppose that’s why I keep writing, and teaching, and holding out hope when I look in the eyes of those kids in my workshops. For who among us can really say we know which timeline we inhabit?

You wouldn’t have given up, and neither will I. Even if we’re born and die a thousand times. As Rebecca Solnit put it, “This work is worth it just for the hummingbirds.” I saw one hovering outside the window today, and I knew it was true: there is no world like this one.

Don’t you give up, I tell the kids in my class. Don’t you do that.

About the author:

A first-generation American of Caribbean descent, Susan DeFreitas is the author of the novel Hot Season, which won a Gold IPPY Award, and the editor of Dispatches from Anarres, an anthology of short fiction in tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin (forthcoming 2021). Her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry have been featured in the Writer’s Chronicle, the Huffington Post, the Utne Reader, Story magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Portland Monthly, and High Desert Journal, along with many other journals and anthologies. A former green tech blogger and environmental journalist, she divides her time between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Portland, Oregon, and has served writers as a freelance editor and book coach since 2009.