Now, I know it's a lot to think about, but considering that every probability is real somewhere, there is a version of you that is, let's say... a famous pianist, or a cosmonaut! No, it's- This is real. Absolutely real. As real as you and me right now. Look, everything boils down to quantum proabilities, right? Yes it does, trust me.

Imre stared at his ceiling, going over that moment again and again and again. There had been a lot of moments like that. Him trying to describe ideas that even his colleagues found baffling, and her face scrunching up like a ball of paper when she tried to understand. She had never really got the whole idea. To her, the whole thing had been just another expression of hindsight, a hypothetical.

He hadn't turned on his lights yet, the pale light of the morning was greyed by the fabric of his curtains. Curtains he wasn't sure he wanted to open. The light would be too much. Even with the curtains, the brightness of the new day was... Blinding was the wrong word. Blinding is what he needed. When the darkness had enveloped him in the early hours of the morning, he could pretend to be asleep, he could pretend that he wouldn't have to face the next day.

But he would.

Already he could feel the anticipation of his alarm clock as time moved sluggishly yet relentlessly on. He knew that it may not go off, that it may break. There was the possibility... But he also knew not to kid himself. This alarm clock would be the one to ring, and he would have to climb out of bed, get dressed, and face the day. All without her.

Okay, let me start again. I promise this will be over soon, don't worry. If we want to know where an electron is, the best we can do is describe it as a fog of probability. It's more likely to be where the fog is densest, and least likely where it's thinnest. But, when we measure it, all that fog evapourates and we find that it is definitely... here, for example. Well, in another world, that fog has evapourated and we - different 'we' - find that it is definitely there! Because, well, the fog only seems to evapourate becase when we measure it, we... become part of the fog, in a way. Do you understand?

His fingers fumbled with his laces. Part of him was still expecting her hand to tousle his dark hair as he tried to tighten those shoes that were ever so slightly too big for him. But he was not the Imre who had her anyway, and thus that hand never came, and his hair remained tidy.

Finishing off both shoes, he sat up and wondered which to fetch first, his coat or his bag. He went over that problem for quite some time, the only reason being he didn't want to do either, and thinking about it stopped him from pushing through that marshland of effort. He did them both, in the end, but he didn't remember in which order.

The trip to work was as grey as his bedroom, to the point where Imre wondered whether he had even left. The fog muted both colour and sound together, and the droning of cars streaking across wet roads would have lulled him to sleep had he not been walking.

But, here and there he glimpsed scraps of graffiti, little works of art that pierced the grey like flowers through concrete. He remembered how much she liked to paint. She had wanted to paint the walls when she moved in, little decorations, here and there. The prospect had made her smile so much it hurt Imre to even think of it.

He shut his eyes whenever he saw the graffiti now, and hurried on to work.

So, because we are just a part of the fog as the electron was, every other possibility of us exists elsewhere in the fog! Yes, this is real. It's science. These possibilities aren't hypotheticals, they're real, every single one of them.

The words of his colleagues barely reached him as he scribbed down notes on something he didn't care about enough to remember. His hand wrote from muscle memory alone. He wondered what his writing would look like when he checked later. Part of him didn't want to check. He would rather leave things in the fog now. Nothing was certain in a fog, and when nothing's certain, nothing hurts. Not as sharply, anyway.

When he eventually went to the toilet, he stared at his reflection as he washed his hands. He knew that somewhere, an Imre was looking into a mirror with tousled hair. An Imre whose limbs were not filled with a lukewarm rot that made every movement slow and aching. An Imre who still had her.