My parents are heroes. Everybody knows that. Don't try to hide it, you've all seen the movie. Global pandemic suspiciously linked to multiple governments, my parents go on a globetrotting adventure, find help from various military intelligence defectors, lots of cool chase scenes, they eventually manage to spread the vaccine before the virus mutates to the final form or whatever.

  I've never watched it.

  But every year, I go to my parents' little get together for vaccine day. It's a day of memory for us all. But everyone always agrees to not make it a day of sadness. We reminisce on the happy things, we ugh at the comedy of our past, so inevitably created by the passage of time and the shared fondness that has overcome the embarrassment of yesteryear.

  It's torture for me, but I try not to let it show.

  I turn 29 this year, but I'm much older than that. The movie won't show you why; The books, the articles, nobody but us knows about my parent's secret third colborator. It would be kind of hard to pce me as that person, anyway, since I was 5 years old at the time.

  To make a long story short: time travel is possible. I invented it, and I can't invent it again. There's a weird bootstrap paradox going on there that I've decided to stop thinking about. All I know is that when I finally did it at 28 years old, orphaned from both my parents, in a devastated world, I did what anybody would do. I tried to help my parents stay alive. All the mysterious defecting military intelligence folks never existed. That was all me sending information backwards through time. Repeatedly. Until we finally got it right.

  Somehow, I remember it all. Only me. I told my parents, in one of the st messages I sent, who it was that was helping them. I asked them not to tell me, and promised that one day I would tell them.

  That day was st year. Whatever reason made me remember every single life I've lived kicks in when I originally invented the time machine, and within a few weeks my body absorbs probably hundreds of years of memories. I'm basically catatonic for the whole time. It fucking sucks.

  So, when I tell you we reminisce on shared memory: I mean everyone else reminisces. I sit there and try to remember which memory exactly we're talking about.

  When my parents talk about my high school prom, for example. I've gone through so many proms. I can remember five different prom queens and three kings. I've worn a bunch of different suits. I've brought four different girls, and in one life, my gay bestie after his crush shot him down.

  My fiancé is holding my hand. She knows this is hard for me. Every year, she asks if I want to come this year, and every year I tell her yes. Not for my parents. Not for the family. I need to let myself face this reminder of all that was. I need to remember who I am, in this life.

  I don't remember my life as a linear sequence of events, I just remember ten different versions of it at the same time. Did I have a fight with mom about breaking her vase? No, in the final timeline I ended up apologizing immediately instead of denying and hiding it for a week. Man, that me was such an annoying teenager, I'm gd nobody else remembers him. Did I have a fight with my now-fiancé about making something of myself when we were both 20? Yes, that was a final timeline event, because in this world, there's no reason to push myself - the pandemic-and-subsequent-war were stopped almost immediately and my parents were adamant that I can allow myself to rex and find my pce in the world.

  We've always had a bit of a tumultuous retionship, so us being engaged now comes as a bit of a shock to me. I mean, I remember dating her in the final timeline, obviously. I also remember countless failed dates. I remember us being at each others' throats. I remember her spping me, I remember walking away from her grief over her parents. I remember a lot of her. I remember a lot of hers.

  She doesn't remember most of them. They never happened, as far as she knows. That's the problem I'm trying to work through.

  How does one date a woman over ten lifetimes? We've been bitter enemies, we've been lifelong friends, we've been everything to each other. I know her better than I've known anybody.

  But she doesn't know me like that. She knows the st me. She doesn't remember hating me, bming me for so many lives lost, she doesn't remember my callousness and cruelty and neglect.

  A few weeks after vaccine day, I vanish from all their lives, like a thief in the night.