^{Taking it back to a level that was more local, that concerned me, that's where I had the real issues. I should be able to drive the car into a telephone pole and kill us both, that decision should be mine to make. And according to her, it WAS my decision, though I’d already made it. Nothing about my potential impact with a solid object on the side of the road conflicted with the history of the world as someone 50 years in the future would know it. If she were a time traveler from my future, I could kill her now, and she'd still be born on the same schedule, still fatefully decide to visit the past that I existed in, still meet me, and so on.
It just didn't seem right. I looked at her as she stared out of the window contentedly, arm waving up and down in the wind, and I smiled, but she didn't see me.}

<sup>Another idea came to mind. If there somehow was a time machine at my disposal, I could travel back into time and warn myself not to ever get married, saving myself a lot of personal anguish and psychological issues. Or I could have saved the baby, if for some reason I got married anyway. I thought about it, and then I realized that all of those events would have to have occurred in order for me to end up where I was that night, driving along an empty Texas road. Then I realized why I was having an issue with it. There could be a change made, I was sure of it, since we only had the perspective from whatever decisions that we'd made and events in our lives, it only seemed like there was one path. It seemed like I couldn't do anything about all the bad things in my life from my current standpoint since I existed in that particular present.

If I had changed things, my other self wouldn't know any better, but would go on believing that things were unchangeable and that life had followed only one path. Perhaps someone else would have met a strange girl with some memory problems in their apartment, and the self that I had saved from all of the bad things would never be the wiser. Her theory still worked, as long as you kept it restrained in the concept of each individual's standpoint. I mentioned as much to her</sup>