The playback filled the control room with crystalline clarity, and I watched Beyoncé's face in the soft glow of the VU meters, searching for that telltale spark of recognition—the moment an artist knows they've captured lightning in a bottle. When it came, it was subtle: a slight parting of her lips, a quickening in her breath, her fingers unconsciously moving to the rhythm of her own voice.
Rico leaned forward in his chair, a man witnessing the birth of a prophecy he didn't know I'd carried for years. "This ain't just a hit," he murmured, his voice thick with emotion. "This is history."
Standing behind the console, I made minute adjustments to the mix, my fingers dancing across faders that felt both foreign and familiar. In my first life, I'd done this same dance on sleek digital boards, but there was something pure about the warm hiss of analog tape, the gentle compression of tubes pushing toward saturation. The limitations of 2005's technology had forced me to be more creative, more intentional.
"There's something in the bridge," Beyoncé said, leaning closer to the speakers. "It needs... something." She hummed a counter-melody, one that in my memory had been added three months after the original recording, becoming a signature element that countless artists would try to replicate.
"Like this?" I sang softly, matching her improvisation but taking it somewhere new, somewhere better. Her eyes widened—that same look I'd seen a lifetime ago, in a different studio, under different circumstances. But the magic was the same.
"Exactly like that," she breathed. "How did you know?"
The weight of foreknowledge pressed against my chest. "Sometimes," I said carefully, "you can just feel where a song wants to go."
Rico was already reaching for the talkback. "B, you want to lay that down now?"
She nodded, already moving toward the recording booth, but paused at the door. "Marcus," she said, and my name in her voice sent echoes rippling through twenty years of memory, "there's something different about you. The way you hear music... it's like you're listening to it from everywhere at once."
I forced a smile, though my heart hammered against my ribs. "Maybe I just know what I'm looking for."
"No," she said thoughtfully, "it's more than that. It's like you've already found it, and you're just waiting for the rest of us to catch up."
The moment stretched between us, pregnant with possibilities. In my previous life, our collaboration had been brief, professional, unremarkable. Now, standing in this carefully reconstructed past, I could feel the timeline bending around us like light through a prism, splitting into infinite potential futures.
The spell broke when Rico cleared his throat. "We losing the vibe here, or we making history?"
Beyoncé laughed—that rich, genuine sound I'd eventually hear across breakfast tables and lazy Sunday afternoons—and disappeared into the booth. As she settled behind the microphone, I began crafting the new counter-melody in my mind, weaving together threads of past and future into something that could only exist in this precise moment.
"You really are something else, kid," Rico said quietly as I adjusted the recording levels. "Sometimes I forget you're only seventeen."
*If he only knew*, I thought, watching the woman who would become my wife prepare to sing a melody I'd carried across decades. The irony of it all would have been amusing if it weren't so terrifying—every decision a butterfly's wing, every success a potential deviation from the path I needed to walk.
But as the red recording light blinked on and the first notes of the counter-melody filled the room, I realized that maybe Maria had been right. Sometimes the most powerful changes come not from forcing the future into familiar shapes, but from letting it find its own way home.
I closed my eyes and listened as Beyoncé's voice soared through the bridge, transforming my memories into something new, something better. In that moment, I wasn't seventeen or thirty-five—I was timeless, suspended between what had been and what could be, conducting an orchestra of possibilities toward their perfect resolution.