He had been hiking alone, a November afternoon, when he stepped onto the ridge and the moment opened. There was no other word for it. Time did not stop. Everything continued exactly as before. But the moment had a quality he had not felt before and has not felt since: it was available. He understood immediately what that meant, the way you understand something that bypasses explanation.
He could return to this. Not the place. The moment.
He stood on the ridge for half an hour. He did not use it. He was twenty-nine and did not have a decision large enough for it yet, or thought he didn't, which turned out to be the same thing. He went home.
He went back to the ridge four times in the following decade. The save point was still there each time, unchanged, patient in the way objects are patient. It did not demand anything. It was simply available.
He had never used it because he was always waiting for the right moment, which he understood, at some point, was not a waiting but a decision. He had decided not to use it. He made this decision without making it, which is a kind of decision available only to people who found something early and had too much time to think about what they would lose by using it.
If he used it, he would go back to twenty-nine. He would not remember the save point itself. He would wake up on a November morning with the sense that he had something to do, and he would go hiking, and find the ridge, and have a twenty-nine-year-old's understanding of what to do next.
What stopped him was not fear of what he would change. It was that he did not want to stop being the person who had spent twenty-three years knowing about the ridge. That person seemed to him worth keeping.
He went back to the ridge less often now. He thought about it the same amount.