i am staying at the cartwright hotel in san francisco.
her name is betsy.
she is not “historic.” she is old. the good kind of old. floors that remember footsteps. hallways that narrow like they were built for human scale, not fire code maximalism. she has not been sanded down into generic hospitality. she still has edges.
across the street stands the building i still call the sir francis drake, even though it wears a different name now.
in 2005, Lisa and i were married there.
i can stand on this block and point to the exact coordinates where my life forked.
but that isn’t the beginning.
in 1992, i was a graduate student in san francisco for the sigplan conference. i stayed on this block. i walked these sidewalks with the casual ignorance of youth. i did not know that the geometry of my future was already entangled with this place.
three separate universes of self. same block.
and here is the part that destabilizes me:
the house mother at betsy has worked in hotels on this block for forty years. she remembered the holiday inn that stood here in 1992.
she is a living invariant.
while i aged. while i married. while i fractured. while i returned “on break from life.” she remained within the same physical coordinate system.
this block is no longer a street. it is an anchor point in spacetime. a place where multiple versions of me exist in superposition—not as particles, but as stories laid on top of each other so precisely they start to shimmer.
i used to believe the universe was single. closed. explainable in principle, even if not in practice.
then one day, thinking about the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, i followed its implications until they stopped being academic and started being personal. if branching realities are real, then continuity is not mystical—it is structural. it becomes the kind of thing you can feel in your bones and still fail to prove. the mind reaches for it anyway.
i did not read this argument.
i derived it.
i may be wrong. but the mere fact that the argument exists—that it falls naturally out of physics-smart people sincerely attempting to describe reality—obliterated the word “impossible” for me.
once you remove “impossible,” the category of magic reopens.
not wand-waving nonsense.
the deeper definition: reality behaving in ways that exceed the psychological limits of explanation.
what is a spell, if not the convergence of time, memory, identity, and matter in a single improbable coordinate?
this block is a spell.
the atoms of the sidewalk have persisted while entire versions of me have risen and collapsed around them. i have died socially. reassembled emotionally. multiplied conceptually. and yet the geometry remains.
betsy remains.
the drake remains.
the woman at the front desk remembers 1992.
tell me that isn’t strange.
tell me that isn’t at least adjacent to magic.
i am not claiming supernatural forces.
i am reporting interference patterns.
and standing here, across from the place where i was married twenty years ago, while resting between lives in 2025, i can feel the branches touching.
betsy has been here the entire time.
waiting.