No Surprises

After it all ended I made a journey that I had never expected to take. It wasn't my idea. Mokuba was still somewhat shaken and confused about the events that had transpired over the past several years, and he expressed an interest in visiting our childhood home. Initially, I was dismissive, and I became increasingly irritated every time he broached the subject. It was not that I disrespected his wishes, but I couldn't understand them. Our former life has always struck me as largely irrelevant—a small footnote at the end of a voluminous text that inspires little curiosity and invites no explanation.

However, as I am sure is common knowledge by this point, Mokuba's mind is not the same machine as mine, and I wouldn't have it otherwise. So we set out for this journey into the past.

Our time-traveling expedition took us through the blustery suburbs of Moscow and through a labyrinth of towering monolithic gray-faced apartment complexes that make the horizon look small by comparison. To make matters worse, we didn't speak the language, neither of us could remember the exact address of our childhood home, and all records on the matter had been lost, reducing us to the state of vagabonds circling the same streets in an erratic, purposeless stupor.

I had just about neared the end of my patience when I heard Mokuba gasp beside me then fall completely still, as if all the air had been forced out of him. I turned to where he was looking and felt a similar shock—there it was. Quiet, unassuming, it almost blended into the background. But it touched me with a sharp pang. I stepped away. I decided to let Mokuba have his moment and then we would leave as quickly as possible.

I waited for a minute, carefully counting off the seconds on my watch, but he was still standing transfixed, his eyes and whole mouth hanging open.

"Okay, you've seen it. Can we leave now?"

"We came all this way and you just want to turn around and go back?"

"Yes. That it precisely what I want. Now are we going or not?"

He was silent for another moment. "Doesn't it make you think…of what might have happened if we had never left here?"

"No."

"How can it not? Our lives might have been completely different if…Dad" (he uttered the word with the uncertainty of someone taking their first stab at a foreign language) "hadn't died. I mean, our lives would have been completely different! We never would have gone to Japan or met Yuugi or Isis….there's so much that never would have happened…" He left out the one thing that we both could have done without having had happen.

I sighed. "I don't think about those things because there's no point. We can't change it now."

"I know." We continued to stand for a moment, watching the sun blink in and out of view behind the clouds.

"I know it doesn't change anything, but there were times when we were in danger, or I thought you were in danger, and I couldn't help but wish that things hadn't turned out this way. Like, maybe if something had been different then we would have been happier if we could have just been…normal." He shrugged. "It's stupid I guess. I mean, we've turned out pretty good and we've had some pretty cool adventures, but…I just wanted to know what it would feel like to come back."

"But this isn't what you wanted, is it?"

He shook his head. "It doesn't feel like I thought it would."

He's right. The buildings, the trees, the streets—the whole city itself feels like it's been rendered in miniature. Everything seems so small and distant, it's too unfamiliar to be placed in any meaningful context. Letting my eyes wander over the sweeping banks of black windows and trying to project my memories onto them is like trying to rebuild a shattered puzzle—like trying to fix something that fundamentally wants to stay broken.

He can feel it, but he can't articulate those thoughts. The only thing that he can express is disappointment. What he can't put into words is the realization that by returning to this place he was trying the lock on a gate to a life that no longer exists, and no matter how hard he turns that key it won't be enough to bend the fabric of space-time that keeps us on the other side. Because time only goes one way. At least, most of the time.

We take the bus back into the main city, having not trusted our own car on the more precarious streets. It's rush hour, and the bus is packed with drooping faces and stooped shoulders, people asleep with their eyes open, ready to retreat from the day.

I wonder if this was the life that Mokuba was talking about when he spoke of normalcy.

I won't attempt to draw the line between genetics and environmental circumstance, to try and find a perfectly linear cause and effect relationship between each variable that has interceded into my life and helped shape me, but here, drifting through the streets of Moscow I feel that same tug—the pull I felt lying unconscious on my foster parent's floor, a metal hook looped around my ribs that tugged me forward when I first laid eyes on the Blue Eyes White Dragon card, on Yuugi, on Gozaburo. It was like someone from behind tapping me on the shoulder and telling me that the life I wanted would never bear the faintest resemblance to what anyone would consider "normal."

Because what's normal for most people is stultifying—it's going through life without meeting rivals and thus without making progress, it's never looking beyond your immediate goals to what could be greater, it's staring idly at your life as it rolls over and slowly fades to black and never being surprised by anything.

The truth is, even if our birth parents had never died and their family had not forsaken us, I still would have found a way out of whatever small and comfortable life that they would have circumscribed around me. Maybe that's a destructive impulse. Or maybe it's not. The universe was empty until it exploded.

As we watch the buildings drift by in the glaze of the setting sun I wonder if this homecoming felt so alien because this city has never been my home at all. Through the window every view seems so fleeting, a moment snatched away too quickly to be fully understood or appreciated, and there's something about that that I can't help but let reverberate inside me. Because every experience I've ever had, no matter how momentous it seemed at the moment, has whittled away in time. Even those identities—those states—that felt like they would last forever had a way of dissolving around me.

Maybe by returning here Mokuba was hoping to make those moments last a little longer, to find something solid and permanent at the end of all this constantly eroding terrain that we could say was definitively ours. Maybe he wanted to find one thing that he knew would last forever, only to realize that is has long since disappeared.

I watch him out of the corner of my eye, ruffle his hair, and manage to catch the tail end of his rueful smile. When I'm with him I could be anywhere—any spot on earth, any time, it wouldn't matter. I could roll the dice a thousand times. I could climb to the peak of the universe and gaze out over every conceivable set of possibilities that could have been my life—and I would still choose this one. Every time.