I think I know how to heal this dying world.
There’s only one hope I carry with me now: that I could be the right person to do it. I’ve maimed and killed, feared and hated—but I have also loved, rescued, protected, created, and given birth. I contain everything that is human—and finally, after everyone I’ve been, none of it is beyond my understanding. Because I am understanding. I am unity.
And you, I think, meeting my own eyes—
You are me.
Afterword
I was still in high school when I started writing the first version of Unity. (Note: I solemnly swear not to take eighteen years to write my next novel.) A dear friend asked me whether it was possible for two people to perfectly understand one another, and that simple question blew my teenage mind wide open, because I had no good answer. I tried to imagine what such a true understanding would be like, and what it would change about being human. I started writing what I thought was a short story—and for nearly two decades I kept it on the back burner, chipping away at it in tiny but relentless increments.
Meanwhile, I grew up into a world ruled by severe disagreements, failures of empathy, and willful refusals to understand. I wrote some chapters while coming out as trans, others while weathering intense loneliness and isolation in my 20s, others while making incredible human connections in my early 30s (much love to Team Eclipse). I revised between protesting multiple wars, living through multiple economic collapses, and watching climate change nibble away at coastal cities. Now the finished novel is going to press in the midst of an historic pandemic, while a fragmented nation wrestles with the very definition of the word “unity”—whether it should be a call for violently enforced homogeneity, or a celebration of everything that becomes possible when very different cultures, memories, and ways of being are allowed to coexist and share experiences.
This story has radically changed in the time it’s taken me to tell it—as radically as the world has, and I have, over those same years. On behalf of all the people I’ve been from then to now, thanks for taking the trip with me.
About the Author
Elly Bangs was raised in a New Age cult and once rode her bicycle alone from Washington State to the Panama Canal. She lives in Seattle. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Escape Pod, and others, and she’s a graduate of Clarion West (Class of 2017). Learn more about her at elbangs.com.
