Multiverse

this magic moment

I often think in alternate realities. What I mean by that is that I think of everything that could happen as not a possibility but a certainty. Not if I get shot, but when I get shot. Not if I will win the lottery, but when I win the lottery. Not if I will have lunch with Bob Dylan when I have lunch with Bob Dylan. Seriously, it applies to any thought that crosses my brain. In the span of a day, I allow myself to go from writing a best-selling fiction novel to becoming a professional Audible narrator, singing a song at a local open mic night, and going to jail because someone framed me for murder. As I write this, I now wonder if this is a psychological condition for which I don’t know the name.

I do know that I am not alone in this. It’s a particular language I speak almost exclusively with my friend Ben. As a result, our sentences to each other often start with phrases like, “When our screenplay about young Leonardo Dicaprio sells, we should...”

Or “When the lady from Death Becomes Her pokes me with the magic anti-aging potion, I will...”

This year I have strangely experienced a lot of grief due to this unknown condition. The robbing of time that the pandemic took from us is actual. My hair clients need help figuring out why they’ve aged. Likewise, I am trying to figure out why I’ve aged. It has been both a slow creep and a sudden descent into staring down the second semester of life. I think, “did eighteen-year-olds always look this young?” on a far too regular basis for my liking.

Earlier in the year, I read a book called 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals. Don’t let the title fool you; this is no book about time management. Instead, it is a book about how futile it is to manage our time. It’s a sobering yet strangely joyful reminder that every choice we make comes at the cost of another. The nature of this choice is what creates the meaning of our days. We can not do everything. This concept poses quite a challenge to my previous notion that all possibilities are inevitable. I now grapple with the truth that the likelihood of me opening an herbal apothecary in New England, where I reside with my sister and Aunts in an old victorian home, casting spells and drinking midnight margaritas, is rather unlikely.

I’ve had to step back and allow myself to grieve all of the alternate realities. On my current trajectory, I will not be making out with Cillian Murphy at an ice hotel during this lifetime, and that will have to be ok. I’ve never been one to spend too much time lamenting over making the wrong choice. I’m not a person that typically finds myself paralyzed by having to make a decision. I make one, and then I experience the outcome. I have a level of choice about how to feel about it. At least, that’s the way I’ve always seen it. So this lamenting over lives unlived is unusual for me. It points to something else.

Over the summer, I made a bucket list. I filled it with action items that seemed easy enough to complete but would hopefully allow me to bring my life more in line with the one I long to be living. I left the list on my dresser untouched until it eventually started mocking me. I swear I could hear it whisper, “not well bitch” when I asked myself how I had done at crossing off the items. How difficult would it have been to eat some watermelon in a body of water? And yet it never happened.

My favorite place on the planet is, hands down, the bookstore, but I find it both a heaven and a hell. On the one hand, It’s full of potential, and on the other pure pressure. I wonder at all the choices that lay before me, a library of lives unlived, poetry unwitnessed, knowledge not gained. I recently compiled two lists of films. Those I wish to rewatch and those I still desire to see. But where will I find the time to do both? I’ve also wanted to take Spanish classes, brush up on sign language, and paint a large-scale watercolor. And thus the dilemma. Time is finite, and what do I do with what I have left?

Something about staring down the barrel of the back half of your life makes you start grasping. The mid-life crisis is no small wonder. It’s primal. We watch our faces melt, feel our bodies begin to creak, and our memories fade ever so slightly. So, of course, we would desperately seek out what makes us feel alive. We see the fire and already know we are goners, so we might as well cannonball into it in gasoline undies. But, of course, it takes consideration not to take the lit match in our hands and burn it all down. It takes restraint; it takes effort; takes presence.

Presence is the cure, after all. I wish I could say the practice of presence comes more easily to me than imagination and rumination. But, alas, it doesn’t. I spend far too much time thinking of the shoulds. What should I have done? What should I do? When the only one I have any semblance of control over is what am I doing right now? And that’s all, folks. It’s taking the book in hand, opening it up, and reading what’s on the current page.

Originally written in 2020. Still feels true.