Look Before You Leap

I swear I saw it ripple when she removed the sheet from it. The silvery surface shifted like the surface of a pond, of a lake. It reacted, almost imperceptible, before it settled in and was still.

Beneath the cloth there was a mirror. The smooth metallic surface was free of any blemish or imperfection. It was liquid silver without any sort of edge to it, not just sitting on top of the cloth beneath it but almost appearing to stand in defiance of it.

The cloth around it was black, was solid. The mirror in contrast stood like a portal to another world.

I don't know why exactly and cannot in any way put my finger on anything close to an answer but I was both compelled and repelled by the sight of the mirror. I felt my fingers tense, flexing against my initial instinct to thrust forward to see more of it.

The mirror was liquid mercury. It was smooth and it was even and it was deadly. It was attraction and repulsion. I needed more.

"So now we know the what," the woman said, her fingers curling in an intricate dance that hovered just over the surface of the mirror, "The next question remains when. How far back do you need to go to have your second chance? Where do you need to intervene to make a difference? To make the most of it?"

I didn't need to think on this matter, not at all. My first instinct was the only correct instinct because there is, if nothing else, one moment in my life when I know I had the chance to change everything for myself. When I ought to have leapt, but stayed grounded instead.

Before I went to college my life was in a holding pattern. I lived in my little town surrounded by little minds and little expectations. I didn't have a different option. Geography, if nothing else, made all my choices for me.

But I stepped onto that bus to my college and I did it with every expectation of a new life. I swore up and down that I was going to be someone else and somehow by the time I stepped off the bus I had lost all my momentum, my drive, to embrace it.

If I was going to make a difference, to fix things, that was when it needed to happen. That long bus ride where I stepped on with one perspective, closed my eyes, and woke up with another.

"Interesting," she said, musing at my memories, "It's an option. It's far back though, so many threads to unravel. No telling, really, what changes beyond the ordinary would be necessary."

"I don't..." I started, stumbled and tried again, "I don't understand."

Through the surface of the mirror I caught her grin, it was all that I could see and it was only there for a flash before the surface was silvery reflective of no image at all once more.

"But of course you don't, dear. You don't understand any of this but then that's the whole point, isn't it? It would be cruel of me to think otherwise, and yet maybe it would be cruel of me to not at least try to explain before moving forward.

"Tell me, dear, do you knit?"

I shook my head.

"Then you probably wouldn't understand but a project, a knitting project, is more than just an interconnected series of hoops and loops and thread. It's interwoven to a frankly astonishing degree. Each new move is subject to the whims and the pressures of all the ones that came before it, and if you want to correct a past mistake you can't go in, snip it out, and repair that one section. You have to unravel all of the stitches that follow the one you need to fix.

“At least if you want to do it right.

"If your mistake is one stitch back, well that's easy. Not much to change. Even if it's on the same row it's still fairly simple.

"But if you have to go back hundreds of stitches into the past, well you can do it. You can unravel everything and get to that one spot. You can fix it and you can move forward from there, but god it will change everything.

"Everything that came before and everything that came afterwards. No matter how hard you try and no matter how close you keep it, the fact is that the sweater will never be the same again.

"Are you prepared for that? Are you ready and willing to take that chance?"

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