Proving Quantum Mechanics With Ponies

Full Circle

“Mr. Dedrick, do you have the answer?”

I had the sensation of falling, but that cut away to sitting in a chair in my high school calculus class. It was like waking up from a dream you had been falling in right before hitting the ground. But I was falling. I was somewhere else, I thought. My mind pulled the parts together. Twilight. How could I have forgotten? Moving from one universe to another had been more disorienting the second time around.

“We’re waiting Mr. Dedrick.”

I finally considered where I was. My mind quickly switched to the task at hand. I looked passed my incipit calculus teacher to see the problem: a simple derivative.

“Negative X divided by Y,” I answered coolly.

“Correct Mr. Dedrick, it seems you were with us after all.”

My teacher bantered on about the problem as I sat interpreting the situation in my seat. Apparently nobody saw me suddenly join drop in to join class, or maybe everyone was asleep. I looked around to entertain the idea but it too far-fetched. I thought for the remainder of the day on this. No one acted that I had left for two months, everyone was the same. The dates printed on whiteboards told me it was the day after I left. All of the signs told me it was impossible for me to have left. The memories I had of the past two months began to grow hazy in my mind, like a dream you forget soon after waking up. Was that it? Was it a dream? All of the evidence pointed toward that conclusion. I was missing the thing that would have told me otherwise: the machine. I had passed through the portal holding it out in front of me. It should have been transported with me, but it was nowhere to be found. I have never seen or heard of it since.

I walked home thinking I had imagined it all, that it was all made up. I stopped before my door and reached for the handle. Entranced in my thoughts, I forgot the most important thing when dealing with my front door. Beware sun baked knobs. When I had been rethinking my life that day at school, my doorknob sat in the sun and absorbed its heat like metal tends to do. You can imagine what happened next. I touched the handle, and my nerve endings went crazy. I immediately pulled back and began shaking my hand furiously trying to cool it off. After a few short seconds of calming down, I checked for damage. I was not burned, but there was something more interesting on the palm of my hand. Scrapes and scratches. Healed over, but still there. It clicked in my mind. I checked my elbow: a half-scabbed gash, about an inch or two long.

The rest of what I saw that day would solidify in my mind what had really happened to me. News stories about miraculous pieces of ice that had floated to the tropics from the poles without melting. This happened three days ago. A meteor shower that will occur in a week given a chunk of space ice’s trajectory, and, to everyone’s confusion, had been overlooked by scientists. It was proof enough for me.

So in the end maybe it was a boredom induced fantasy or maybe for once something great and fantastical happened in life. I don’t care which actually occurred, but I know which one I will still believe on my deathbed. And who’s to say what’s possible? That’s the great thing about life: it’s not a microwaveable macaroni and cheese meal. Sometimes, when you open the cover, you get something a little bit different.