Parallel

hours ago when I fell into a food coma after inhaling three slices of double pepperoni on my walk home from Toad’s, the most popular place for Yalies to drink, dance, and make bad decisions. (None for me so far—I forced myself to write CAN’T TONIGHT! in response to Michael’s 11:57 p.m. text request that I “stop by” his house on my way home. When does BE RIGHT THERE become an acceptable response to a booty call from a guy who hasn’t taken you on a real date yet? Doesn’t the fact that this guy could wake up tomorrow with no clue who you are warrant some bending of the hookup rules?)
    Continuing my morning ritual, I retrieve my phone from under my pillow and begin scrolling through my recent photos. I’ve taken dozens since I got here, logging every potentially erasable experience. These photos are my security blanket. As long as they look the way I remember them, I know that things haven’t changed too dramatically overnight. I breeze through them quickly today, skipping over one of a group of girls in blue tank tops that Caitlin must’ve taken, eager to get to the one I care most about: the photo I took of Michael on my birthday. When I see it, I relax, satisfied that everything is the way it’s been for the past two and a half weeks. At first it seemed silly to hope that reality wouldn’t change again, but each day, the possibility gets a little easier to imagine, and my life in L.A. gets a little more distant, like something that happened a long time ago, or in a dream.
    As of this morning, I have nineteen days’ worth of alternate memories. As Caitlin predicted, I seem to be getting my parallel’s memories as she lives them, which means that right now, I have everything up to September 26, 2008. I’ve been trying to write down my new memories as they come, but the task is harder than you’d think. It’s not like the new stuff is top of mind when I wake up, so remembering takes effort. And even then, I can’t always tell what came from the parallel world. Sometimes a detail will stand out, but most of the time, my parallel’s memories just blend in with my own, making it difficult to tell them apart. Did I bring my lunch that Wednesday or buy it? Did I wear boots that Friday or my red ballet flats? Does it matter? The one notable difference between my real memories and the new ones is how sterile the new ones are. I remember things my parallel has done as though I did them, but I have no sense of how she felt in the moment. That’s how I can tell which memories don’t belong to me—I don’t feel anything when I replay them in my head.
    The journalist in me is still skeptical that entanglement is the explanation for all this, but Caitlin has gone from pretty sure to totally convinced. She’s now read every book, magazine article, and academic paper on the subject and says she no longer has any doubts. It’s hard to argue with her, and I’m not sure I want to anyway. What she’s proposing is hard to wrap my head around, but it makes my life make sense, and right now, that’s reason enough to accept it.
    If our world is entangled, it looks like I’m the only person who remembers the way things were before. Every day I scour the internet for evidence that there are others like me out there, but I have yet to find any. Plenty of people have written about the collision—“the earthquake that wasn’t an earthquake”—and theories about its significance abound, but few appear willing to accept Dr. Mann’s explanation, and no one has drawn a connection between the tremor on September 8, 2008, and the global headache on September 9, 2009 (though people have lots to say about each). Apparently, millions of people woke up on my birthday with pain at the base of their skulls. Even the conspiracy theorists haven’t contemplated that their memories may have been wiped out and replaced by the memories of their parallel selves. Dr. Mann has his theories—and after our visit to see him, surely his suspicions—but no real evidence. Not so far, anyway. Caitlin wants to tell him about me, but I’m still not sure we can trust him. What better way to restore his damaged reputation than to go public with my story? I’m all for scientific progress, but there’s no way I’m becoming some physicist’s lab specimen. Or ending up in a padded room somewhere.
    Light is streaming in through the crack between my curtains, which is surprising because it was supposed to rain today. I tug at the