Dawn found her on the wooden boardwalk, where Lady Bird Lake breathed a faint mist into the cold air. She had already circled the lake by bike, a ritual she performed when the stakes were high. Her legs still hummed with the rhythm of the ride, her lungs loose from the slow arcs of Qigong, the silk fan in her hand still warm from her grip.
Below her, the water made a language of its own, a hush-and-sway that seemed to say: Begin.
She closed her eyes.
The first figure to step forward was herself, one year older—taller somehow, shoulders unburdened, a single gray strand at the temple catching the early light. This future self carried the air of someone who had crossed a hard threshold and chosen not to look back.
“You did it,” she said, the voice steady as the lake’s stillness before sunrise.
“I honored myself,” she corrected. Her own voice felt foreign in her throat, newly claimed. “I learned that letting go could be love, too.”
The year-ahead self touched her sleeve. “The new you is fragile. Ride often. Breathe deep. Feed her well.” Then she vanished in a warm gust, as though folded back into the day.
Another heartbeat. Another arrival.
Ten years hence emerged with the grounded grace of someone who had lived in many cities but belonged to all of them. There was a trace of Kyoto in her posture, a whisper of wind in bamboo in her laugh. In her hand she carried a photograph: herself before Kinkaku-ji, cherry petals spiraling at her feet.
“Do you remember the settlement?” she asked.
“I remember my fear,” the present self replied. “And the moment I exhaled and felt myself return.”
“That day,” the decade-older self said, “was when you learned that change arrives the moment you show up for it.” She placed the photograph in the present self’s hand, then blurred and dissolved, like an image in water.
The last to come was fifty years ahead—hair white as moonlight, eyes carrying a kindness sharpened by time. She leaned on a cane carved with vines and blossoms, like something grown from the earth rather than made.
“Do you regret the path?” she asked.
Her answer came quickly. “No. I only mourn the years I spent doubting myself.”
“Doubt teaches compassion,” the elder said. “But courage teaches wisdom. Remember this morning—the day you biked, breathed, and let your life hinge on truth. That was the day you began the chapters I cherish.”
The cane tapped twice on the planks. Somewhere, faintly, the imagined gavel of the mediator fell, sealing her choice.
“One last thing,” the elder whispered. “Before you leave this world, tell the child you once were—and every self you became—that you did well.”
Silence.
She opened her eyes. The boardwalk was empty now, but the words had sunk deep, like rain into soil. She mounted her bike and began the slow ride toward the courthouse. Along the way she passed one of the new vertical gardens—its planters overrun with mint and jasmine, paper lanterns swaying between them like patient moons waiting for night.
By noon she would sign the papers. By evening she would walk beneath those same lanterns, their glow threading through leaves and air. And when the light shifted on the water again, whether in Austin or Kyoto or some other place she had yet to imagine, she would carry the voices of all her selves forward—into every year still to come, and into the gentle twilight of a life fully lived.