Who Can Say Where the Road Goes

There are moments in the life of young Katarina when it seems to her that sailing through time she is gradually losing parts of herself, her soul and feelings, like a wooden boat shedding the damaged or rotten planks from which it was made, and that the lost planks are being replaced with new ones from another kind of wood. There’s a growing, nagging fear that if this process continues, time will make a completely different person out of her, composed of unfamiliar material, which will undermine the image she has of herself and uses as a rudder while sailing through life. Will she then still be the Katarina she was before? At the same time she has the feeling that someone not necessarily of this world is accompanying her through life, gathering the lost planks, and reassembling from them her first self, built of memories and thoughts that belonged to the original Katarina, while the memories and thoughts of the new Katarina, built from other experiences, from a different understanding of those experiences, will become a kind of double, a Katarina #2. Will they be able to co-exist in the same space and time? Will they have conflicts, war with one another? Will one have to die for the other to live?