She knew

She knew. She didn’t know how, and she didn’t know when—but she knew.

On my birthday, several months prior, we were sitting outside talking one evening and she said, “I cleaned the house today and got rid of some things from my past I wouldn’t want my family to see, just so you know.”

When I asked her why, she said, “I won’t be around much longer. I don’t know how; I just know I can’t see my future anymore. It’s just blank. I used to see us, old with kids, but something has changed. It’s just black now.”

Over the next few months, she reached out to people she hadn’t talked to in a long time. She asked if I would still keep up with her family. She made me promise to cut ties with certain people because she didn’t like who I was around them. She was “cleaning the lines.”

And for the last two weeks, so was I. I dreamed about her funeral every night. Yet, when it happened, I was still so utterly, amazingly shocked. I still didn’t see it coming.

I adamantly oppose the idea of predestination. My heart says existentialism is the way—that we are the architects of our own existence. My mind, however, is a “determinism” type of guy; it sees the tracks laid out long before the train arrives. But then, I think of retrocausality.

In the quantum world, the future isn’t just a destination; it’s a participant. If two particles are entangled, an action on one instantly affects the other, regardless of distance. I wonder if lives can be entangled with their own endings—if death is a “fixed point” in the architecture of time. Perhaps the shockwave of that event didn’t just travel forward into my grief; it traveled backward into her vision. She felt the ripples before the stone even hit the water.

She knew something had changed because she had previously seen a different outcome. It wasn’t just a feeling; it was a paradigm shift. It was as if a switch had been flipped, collapsing all the beautiful possibilities into a single, inevitable point of blackness. She wasn’t guessing. She was responding to an echo from a future that had yet to happen.

I’ve spent hours turning over the concept of quantum entanglement, trying to find a name for the tether that stayed taut between us even as she began to drift. Physics says that two entities can become so inextricably linked that they can no longer be described independently—two particles vibrating at the same frequency, governed by the same wave function.

She was the primary particle, colliding with an unavoidable end. Because we were entangled, I felt the rotation of my own world shift to match hers. I didn’t see the “blackness,” but my subconscious was receiving the information nonetheless. My dreams were a reflection of a state-change that had already occurred in her.

It makes me think that “grief” is just the name we give to the violent snapping of that entanglement. Or perhaps it’s darker: perhaps we remain entangled, forever linked to the void. I am still reacting to her, still spinning in alignment with a particle that has disappeared from the visible spectrum, governed by a “knowing” that defies every law of logic I try to hide behind.

We aren’t just moving toward the future. Sometimes, the future is reaching back, grabbing us by the hand, and telling us exactly where we’re going.