From now on, all you are to me

Is an application of Newton's 3rd Law.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,

And one day you'll have to learn

That the only way people will put effort into you

Is if you also put effort into them.

I won't disrupt the balance of forces

By being the one who bothers enough

To make every initial attempt at acceleration,

And if the result is static equilibriumThen so be it.

You are a basis of the human consciousness. You can transform into anything simply by taking pieces of yourself and adding them together to create any linear combination imaginable. You can be anger, hatred, love and joy. You can be war or peace, justice or manipulation. You can be the difference between life and death. You can reduce to zero and spend days experiencing your own dissipation, and yet you can never be empty. There is always the possibility of turning right around to multiply by a different number, becoming one million times the spirit you ever believed you could be. The dimensionality of your mind cannot be reduced to any subset you try and use to define yourself. You are infinite.

I killed Schrödinger’s cat.

Those four words reflected perfectly in my skull until they formed a standing wave, and I pushed my foot harder down on the car’s accelerator with the few minutes I had left. I felt the jolt of force throw me against the back of my seat and knew before it happened that I was about to be pulled over. I felt that infinitesimal movement in a neuron traveling through my brain- a single particle changing its spin in accordance to something within the officer’s mind as he read the number off his radar. I imagined for a second that maybe if I refused to observe him he wouldn’t exist, but when he asked for my identification, I handed over the card I had been given as “proof” I could operate such a vehicle. I don’t know why I even keep that thing around. How can you possibly have a true identity when the loudest part of your consciousness has always consisted of particles entangled with every complex system on the planet?

I feel a wavefunction collapse within me as every new discovery is made- by anyone, anywhere. The evolution is impossible to keep up with, and by now I’ve trained my mind to block out any that isn’t specific to my own physical entity. Otherwise, I would have gone mad before the realization of my quest for the hidden variables I thought might finally silence the constant buzzing and bring peace. Most people said there was no point in searching, but I couldn’t let myself believe that the universe meant for me to be this way. The probability of my existence is so statistically insignificant that Maxwell’s demon must have broken out of the seventh realm of hell to lay his curse on me. But I’m here, and the curse is real, and I wasn’t supposed to reverse it.

I killed Schrödinger’s cat.

The future was in a box and all of humanity stood outside it, watching one event escape at a time. Today I sat on the edge of the road and heard each moment crash down within that box like a falling star, together a blur of blinding light that touched ground and then exploded out into the sky like fireworks. Had one person remained past the grand finale to watch the smoke dissipate, they would have seen the box opened to the carcass that lay within. The universe wasn’t built for this; it was built for freedom.

I killed Schrödinger’s cat.

The idea came to me from a Danish physicist at Copenhagen- a mathematically sound postulate describing a way to achieve decoherence for myself and finally silence the noise. But I screwed something up. I thought I’d untangle myself from the systems, not collapse the wavefunctions of every particle entangled with them. The officer ought to arrest me; he has no idea that as he’s standing by the window writing me a ticket, his entire future is crumbling to ruins in my mind. All the chances he could have taken, all the decisions which were his to make, all the possibilities for his future- all of them were gone. A few calamitous seconds later, the present was equally nonexistent.

I’ve never understood why it’s supposed to be difficult to imagine a superposition of states- to imagine a thing both alive and dead at the same time, built up and torn down at the same time, forced to spin left and right at the same time, moving opposite directions at once. It’s how I’ve lived my entire life. It’s how most do. But oh, this is worse. The alternative is certainty, and certainty, like inertia, is a cruel joke- nothing in isolation should be made to continue in one direction indefinitely, especially not the future of humanity. The outcome of my hunt wasn’t failure. It was destruction.

The universe ended with a bang.

Schrödinger’s cat is alive and well.

When performing the measurement, I had collapsed with the system. In the same moment, I collapsed with every possibility of the universe, and then I continued on with every other possibility of it. This was how the branching of multiverses ended, setting a finite number of arrangements into motion. Many were destroyed soon after, while others lasted on for eons. Some were happy, some were painful, and some as improbable as I. Energy was conserved in each, and over time, nothing was ever lost.

Carl watched the wisps of smoke curl away from the ends of his fingers and disperse into the blanket of stars above him. "Isn't it interesting," he mused, "How affected our perception of the universe is by that one puff, and yet the universe itself is hardly affected at all? And yet so many people believe that the stars rise and set for us."

"Of course," Neil said. "Many young students come to me complaining about the existential dread induced by my description of the size of the universe and illusion of time."

Carl touched his thumb and forefingers together and looked through them to the sky. "I've never understood that sentiment. I speak often about our place in the universe and its indifference to us, but that shouldn't require us to have a negative reaction in response. The universe should fill you with a sense of wonder and gratitude- for the fact that we have the capability to understand it if nothing else."

"Some people find it difficult to be grateful for chaos. They want order in their understanding, need things to fit into their boxes- and by fit I mean they don't just want orderly; they want small and orderly. They want to be the grandiose. It isn't enough to have infinite universes inside of them; for some reason they feel as if ALL the universes need to be inside of them." Neil sent another puff of smoke into the atmosphere. "Watch as it goes," he said. "I'm creating more Chaos. And chaos means that every tiny, infinitesimal change affects the entire future of the entire universe. It's all about sensitive dependence."

"That's true." Carl thought a second. "Although, in the grand scheme of things, the effect is still negligible comparatively. It's our ability to piece together all the effects which is most impressive."

"I don't know," Neil replied. "That's not how I see it. Chaos means that all of our collective actions together, along with every animal and every motion of every planet, star and black hole, are working together to determine our fate. The universe may be enormous, but it means that you are a part of something huge, a piece of the collective puzzle of that galaxy and that what you do actually does make a difference."

"Alright, well, want to see this puzzle piece create an epic change of energy?"

"What kind of energy?"

"I'm about to show you the extent of my potential," Carl replied, and dove headfirst, somersaulting down the grassy hill.

I am 7 years old, over at my best friend’s house when she gets mad at me for telling someone else one of my own secrets before she knew. “That makes you a bad friend” she said. I don’t remember many of her words from those years I knew her, but I do remember those. I don’t know what it is that makes me a bad friend; I just know that I’m doing it wrong.

I am in 5th grade, already in a relationship with a boy that has lasted nine whole months. We talk on the phone every night, and eleven years later I still believe I loved him. “He’s cheating on you” someone said, “I think you should know he likes Kylie.” Kylie was prettier than me, and he was a fifth grade boy. I wasn’t prepared for that.

I am one of the few kids sectioned off into the ‘other’ middle school where everyone else knows each other. People are already starting to have sex and do drugs but I know maybe 7 cuss words. I am used to being friends with everyone, but I can’t relate to these people. The atmosphere is too different, and this change is much harder than I thought it would be.

I am in 8th grade, painfully listening to my best friend of the past 2 years talking about how she tried cutting herself one time with a steak knife while unloading the dishwasher. "God, I'm so emo," she said. I may not have been able to wear bathing suits to the pool the summer prior, but everyone knew that I was a poser who copied everything she did. They knew that phrase, straight from her. I’m not sure anyone ever told her she was wrong for that- not even me.

I begin counting on my hands the people I’m close with, the people who I know won’t go anywhere. I no longer go out of my way to find anyone new, because people can’t really be trusted. I think, “Six is a good number. When problems arise you find out who your true friends are. Six true is still good, I guess.” But I’m still afraid to reach out, even to them, for fear that I’m doing it all wrong. I have been doing it wrong my whole life, and people just scare me now. Everything I can say sounds wrong before it comes out.

I am in 9th grade, and I’ve been told that the boy I’m dating is a pathological liar. “I’ve changed” he said, and I believed him. When he told me he had breast cancer, I was afraid for his life. Fear ignited to anger as a pyrophoric substance in air.

I am leaving for college, and I think I have finally found the self I’m proud of. I believe I can put most of these instances behind me; it’s been a while since things were bad. I have a great relationship, a great group at home, and a great group at my new school. For a while, I am happy with the way things are. That seed of innocence is still alive, watered and sprouting.

It is the 2nd month of school, and my friend’s girlfriend’s friend is brought into the group. She doesn’t appreciate my friendship with the man that she likes, and so she and her friends start inviting everyone to do things without me. Everyone else says they have my back, but for some reason she’s always there. I know how that goes at this point. I am so uncomfortable that I immediately drop the group and only keep in contact with the ones I knew from the start. It doesn’t take long to fade out that way.

It is later in the year and my friends at home are mad at me because I’m bad at communication but my boyfriend’s not and he hangs out with them still and he tells them about all his problems including the ones to do with me. Suddenly I’m the outsider and the bad guy and that doesn’t surprise me; it never does anymore. It’s easier to take someone at face value when you’re face to face, than to give someone else the benefit of the doubt. I’ve never gotten it anyway.

I am in my second year and I broke up with my boyfriend and I’m in bed with my best friend and I’m asking a lot of questions because I guess now I need confirmation from everyone I care about, but the only answers I remember are “I think I’ve been using you” and then a month of silence.

I am home for Valentine’s day and excited to see my old friends- it’s been a long time, and things haven’t been great at school- but I ate something that was full of something that gave me a panic attack. I’m upstairs bawling my eyes out, and when my ex offers to take me home, everyone who I was excited to see gathers together to talk about how I’m immature and rude because I’m ignoring them to drag him off. Because all I care about is sex, even though in reality I just cried for a few hours and fell asleep. The person who started the conversation was one of my six, from 8th grade. You can know people for years and years, and you still won’t get the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t owe an explanation for that.

The seed of innocence is trust and belief, a seed that is planted in our hearts from birth but that requires care and affirmation in order to grow.  A plant that roots itself in childhood and is designed to grow back time and time again after being pulled.A seed that, unfortunately, adolescence is designed to starve and to bury so deep that it becomes almost impossible to nurse back to health- especially in later life, when we become so busy that we forget, or no longer have time to care for it. Yet in most cases, those roots remain. What matters is whether someone opens the blinds.