Did you know there are three main theories about how time works?

Presentists believe that only the present exists. The past and the future aren’t real.

Proponents of the Growing Block Theory believe that the past and the present exist, but the future doesn’t.

Eternalism touters believe that the past, the present, and the future all exist simultaneously. Everything that has ever happened, and everything that will ever happen, is all happening right now at the same time.

Eternalism is supported by Einstein’s theory of relativity, and by the concept of time dilation. Basically, time passes at a different rate depending on where you are or how close you are to a black hole.

To an astronaut light years away in space, we might be living in the future. Or would she be in the past?

There are billions of pasts, presents, and futures. Infinite, actually. New ones are being created every second. And they all exist at the same time. Like frames of a video. We’re all always moving forward.

But somehow I slipped.

I don’t know how it happened. I stepped the wrong way, went too slowly around a corner, overslept—who knows. It doesn’t matter. All I know is I woke up between.

I see them all. Trillions, quadrillons, infinite realities splintering into chains of shards. Each speeding past my eyes. Each carrying humanity. Each split further into another trillion pieces, one for every person or thing in the universe.

The grain of sand at the beach as it is now, as it was one second ago, and as it will be one second in the future. And two. And three. As it was yesterday, last year, when the asteroid killed the dinosaurs.

My childhood home, every moment of its existence. I see it being demolished next year. I see the spot barren in fifty, and I see the inferno when the sun swallows up the earth one day.

I see the frame of me mid-step into my kitchen. That must be when I slipped, because there’s nothing after that in any reality.

I see myself being born. I see the split second in high school when I decided to apply for the casino internship. I see the moment my car met the minivan carrying a family of four.

It’s a still image. It’s happening now, and it will happen again. It has happened infinite times before. It will happen infinite times more. Infinite versions of that family are dying simultaneously and have been forever.

There was no “beginning of time.” We’re always happening over and over again.

Among the shards, I see one of the second I decided to drink that night. It’s attached to all of the prior and subsequent shards in an inconceivable amalgam. Me reaching for the can. Me reaching for my keys. Me reaching for the ignition. This is just one chain among infinite. Infinite copies of the same reality.

I reach out and grab the shard where my fingers touched the keychain. It slices my hand but leaves no mark—time can’t pass here for me to change in any meaningful way.

When I snap the shard in two, it disappears. The rest of the chain dematerializes in a series of pops, leaving a glowing ember at the point of breakage.

More shards form before my eyes. My hand, brushing the keys away. Reaching for my cat on the counter instead.

A new chain floats by me, being created as I watch. The keys, the ignition, the crash.

But out of infinite realities, now there’s one out there where those kids didn’t die that night.