The Quantum Physics of Becoming

by: Rachel Parker

| Published in Issue 58 of Beyond Word Magazine and inspired by this striking painting, “The Artist” from artist Joe Barbella |

I turn the corner and there I am, scattered across sixty floors of mirrored glass. Only it isn’t me. Or rather, it's not just me.

My reflection fractures—eyes multiplied, mouth divided. A kaleidoscope of myself.

There's the girl who once hid in bathroom stalls during lunch, counting ceiling tiles until the bell. The teenager who practiced her signature with different last names. The mother who discovered entire universes in her toddler’s sleepy morning smile.

I read once that particles exist in multiple states at once, countless possibilities suspended in patient chaos until someone observes them. Then they collapse into a single reality.

People aren't so different.

Standing before this building with its confidence of steel and glass, I recognize the truth—how we are always simultaneously who we were, who we are, who we are becoming.

Last night I dreamed I was every age I've ever been, all at once. Nine, recognizing my mother's mood from the sound of her keys dropping in the ceramic bowl by the door. Thirty, lying awake to catalog all the small failures of the day, arranging them like specimens. Eighty, studying the blue veins in my hands, like rivers seen from great heights. When I woke, I could still feel them moving inside me, these women I have been, will be.

But when I am at my desk, pen hovering above paper, something shifts. The scattered light gathers. All those versions of myself, watching from the corners of my life—they blur, then snap. Collapse into one.

Tomorrow I will fragment again, become infinite. But in this moment of creation, the pen scratches paper, leaving its thin, dark trail.

And I am briefly, mercifully singular.