The minute Oran chose is a Tuesday in February when he was forty-three. Not his wedding day. Not the afternoon he finished the building he is most proud of, or the morning his daughter was born, or the last evening he sat with his father. He had considered all of these. He kept a list for nine years before he chose. The Tuesday was the last item he added and the only one he couldn't cross off.
He was at his desk with the completed drawing for a small municipal library in a town three hours north. A modest project, technically correct, nothing that would appear in any journal. He had the kind of satisfaction that comes from something finished and small: not pride, but a quieter thing, the feeling that a particular set of problems has been resolved and would not exist again. The window faced west. The February light came through it at the angle it comes in February, flat and honest. His partner Pei called from the kitchen: are you staying for dinner or going to your brother's?
He said yes without looking up. He didn't know whether he was agreeing to dinner or the brother or simply answering in the affirmative. He looked at the drawing. The light was exactly right. Outside there was a sound he couldn't identify at first, a neighbor's dog, or wind in the wire. Oran sat with this for perhaps forty seconds. Then it was over and he called back: staying.
He has spent years thinking about why that was the minute. He chose it at fifty-three with the deliberateness he has applied to every significant decision. He sat with the list, crossed items off. The Tuesday was the only one that felt, when he tried to enter it mentally, like somewhere you could go on living. Not because it was the most. Because it was honest. Because it knew exactly what it was.
He went into the loop for twelve minutes the first time. He has not been back since. The loop is available to him. It always will be. He thinks about it the way you think about a letter you have written and not sent: complete, waiting, the waiting its own thing.
He is sixty-seven now. The list is still in a drawer in his desk. The crossing-off is thorough, but none of the crossed-off items have disappeared. They are all still there, perfectly legible, exactly what they were.