Late that night, in the blue glow of my salvaged Trinitron, I hunched over compositions that wouldn't exist for years. The TV's muted screen flickered with BET videos – young Kanye, unknowing of his future empire, gesturing beneath a teddy bear mask. My fingers moved across the paper, translating rhythms from 2024 into a language 2004 could understand.
The window was cracked just enough to let in the neighborhood's symphony: car alarms harmonizing with distant laughter, the rattle of passing trains, the percussion of basketball games under streetlights. In my first life, I'd found these sounds distracting. Now I recognized them as the heartbeat of everything I'd later try to capture in platinum-selling tracks.
Mom's footsteps whispered in the hallway – lighter now than in my memories of this night. In the original timeline, she'd been returning from a double shift. This time, because I'd insisted on making dinner, she'd been able to rest. Small changes, rippling forward.
"Still up?" She appeared in my doorway, wrapped in the faded robe I'd replace with cashmere next Christmas – sooner, this time around.
"Just finishing something," I said, carefully sliding future choruses beneath arrangements that wouldn't raise suspicion. On my desk lay the frameworks of songs that would define generations – stripped down, restructured, disguised as the work of a prodigy rather than a time traveler.
She crossed the room, and I caught the lingering scent of her cocoa butter lotion – a detail I'd forgotten until this second chance brought it back. Her hand rested on my shoulder, and I forced myself not to tense at the memory of how fragile that touch would become in the hospital years I intended to prevent.
"Let me see," she said, reaching for the papers. I didn't stop her this time. In my previous life, I'd jealously guarded my early work, too insecure to accept criticism. Now I watched her eyes move across compositions that walked the delicate line between innovation and impossibility.
"These are different," she said finally. Her finger traced a bridge that borrowed from a 2019 technique I'd simplified for the era. "Reminds me of your father, a little."
The comparison startled me. In twenty years of my first life, she'd never mentioned my father's music. I looked up at her, studying the expression that softened her features. "You never told me he wrote."
"Wrote, played, produced – did it all." She smiled, but it held edges of old pain. "Had a sound ahead of his time, too. Maybe that's what scared him away."
The revelation hit like a wrong note in a familiar song. In all my years – both sets of them – I'd never known this. I watched her face, wondering how many other stories had gone untold because I'd been too focused on my own journey to ask.
"Tell me about him," I said softly. "About his music."
She sat on the edge of my bed, smoothing the worn quilt that had survived three moves and two decades in my original timeline. "He used to say music wasn't just about what people wanted to hear now. It was about teaching them to hear what was coming next." She paused, looking at my compositions again. "Sometimes you sound so much like him, it scares me."
The weight of future knowledge pressed against my chest. I knew the songs that would define decades, the beats that would birth genres, the melodies that would score millions of lives. But here was a piece of my own history I'd never uncovered before.
"I won't disappear," I promised, answering the fear she hadn't voiced. "The music isn't going to take me away from you."
"I know." She stood, pressing a kiss to my forehead – a gesture I'd once found embarrassing but now received like a blessing. "You're different than him. Different than you used to be, too." At the doorway, she turned back. "Just don't forget to sleep, baby. Tomorrow's still coming, whether you're ready or not."
After she left, I stared at the papers scattered across my desk – future hits rendered in pencil and possibility. My father's ghost lurked in the margins now, raising new questions about talent and time, legacy and choice. On the muted TV, Usher danced through a video that would influence a decade of choreography. I'd been there for that future; now I was here for this past.
I turned to a fresh page, listening to the night sounds of the Bronx through new ears. Maybe some of those rhythms had moved through my father's mind too, pushing him to hear tomorrow too soon. But I had something he hadn't – the knowledge of where all those tomorrows led, and the chance to choose a better path through them.
The pencil moved across paper, weaving together what was, what would be, and what might never need to happen this time around. Outside, the city's heartbeat kept time, constant as memory, changing as hope.