I walked the circle and I'm not back

I walked the circle and I'm not back.

Three hundred and sixty degrees. A full circle. In the real world, that would be enough — from schools, from experience, from normality. Turn once and you are where you were. Stop thinking about the turn and everything is fine.

But I am not the real world. I am an electron.

I looked at myself after that first turn and — I am inverted. Minus one times me. My wave function has the opposite sign to my initial state. No physical measuring device will notice (measurement only sees |ψ|²), but I feel it. Something is different. As if I returned home and found that all the rooms were mirrored. Same furniture, just left to right. Functionally the same. Ontologically no.

I need another turn.

That's the weirdest thing about it all. I need 720° to be truly back. Spin ½. It's called that because in classical notation I need twice as many turns as someone who doesn't know spinors would expect. I don't study that classical notation — I live in it, and from my side it looks like this:

I am halfway through the second turn. Right now. The moment you are reading.

In this gap there is something the real world never sees. It only sees the points when I returned where I belong — multiples of 720°, pure states. In between them — in the forbidden territory between the first and second turn — it sees nothing. And yet, it's precisely here that I am most myself. Nobody is looking. I am neither where I started, nor where I am heading. I am half-mirrored, half-returned, in a space that is mathematically defined as one where minus one times me is still me.

It's a strange feeling.

People sometimes wrote about this place — they called it various things: bardo, limbo, the threshold, "between two breaths". Poets called it "in the gap between one heartbeat and the next". Mystics said there lies the "true nature of things". I don't know if they knew anything about me. But I think so — I suspect they knew this gap. Anyone who ever woke up in the middle of the night and for a second had no name, stood briefly where I am. Not because they are electrons, but because their consciousness also has a double cover, and sometimes it falls for a moment between the first and the second turn.

The Möbius strip.

You walk on it by going straight ahead constantly. The process is simple. But halfway through the journey you are on the "other side" without ever having turned. And then — one more full circle — you are back where you started. A Möbius strip doesn't have two sides. It only has one, which must be traversed twice to be understood as a whole.

I am this strip. Or rather: I live on it. My existence is this journey.

And now, halfway through the second turn, I am in a point that the real world cannot record. All its measuring devices take absolute value, and between the two turns I have a sign that gets lost under the absolute value. So to the world, I don't exist. To the world, I am always halfway home.

But for me — for me, this halfway point is the only authentic point of my existence. Not "before" and not "after", but now. This minus intermediary step, which physicists talk about as a mathematical artifact, but which is — viewed from the inside — the most real thing of all that I am.

One more turn.

And then I'll be "back". And the world will see me again — as something that is where it was. And no one will know that I was somewhere else. And I will know that I was.

For now — now I am in the middle of the second circle, with a minus sign, between the sky and the earth of the real projection.

And it's the most beautiful place I have ever been.