Choices 

What if there were multiple copies of you, living out permutations of your life in an infinite number of realities? Call it what you like: multiple universes, the multiverse, parallel universes—quantum theory suggests they could exist.

But we humans, with our limited powers of perception, are locked into knowing only one reality at a time. We can only imagine where our lives would lead us, had we made different choices along the way. 

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From Choices:

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I jolt awake. What a freaky dream, one where it was me in the mirror and yet not me. My hair for one thing, chopped and spiked and dyed deep blue. And my face, my face, was out of focus, phase-shifted, like a double exposure with two images badly superimposed.

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            I wobble to the bathroom, my knees fighting the adrenaline rush that woke me.

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           I relax when I see my reflection: shoulder-length brown hair, eyes normal—well, normal for me, anyway, since one is brown and the other green—and my face clearly focused.

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            Then I notice the sticky notes. They rim the mirror in rainbow colors. Remember. Don’t forget him. Read the notebook.

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            Remember what? Remember who? And what’s this about a notebook?

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            There’s another note, bottom center of the mirror.

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            The dreams are real.

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            Impossible.

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            I find a notebook on my desk. It’s red, spiral bound, college-ruled. A neon green sticky note screams: Read me.

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            I open it to see my own handwriting, the back-slanted sprawl of a leftie. I flip through the notebook, noticing the names—Kathleen, Kay, Kate, Kathy.

 

            My memory is fading, like an old photograph left too long in the sun. The edges curl and the images grow faint. The colors bleed away, leaving indistinct people with blurry faces.

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            Maybe that’s my mind, trying to protect itself. Not for the first time do I wonder if all these lives and timelines are the products of my own insanity. Kathleen, Kay, Kate, Kathy—how could I have been all of them? And all at the same time?

 

            The people in my dreams? The faces in the mirror?

 

            I’m writing down everything, starting with the party, just as it happened. No, not as it happened. As if it’s happening, right now. Who knows? Maybe it is happening, in some other universe.