Dai Stihó

In some worlds, and some lives, she never made it to this college. I haven’t been able to find one where we meet in those ones; we’re (excuse the pun) worlds apart, even if we inhabit the same one. It’s just too cosmically unlikely until you get to a truly ludicrous number of quantum worlds, and well, anything’s possible once you have enough monkeys.

In other ones, she goes to college, but she doesn’t apply for the job before ever getting there, which changes the timeline unbelievably. Or maybe it’s believable if you study chaos theory and butterfly effects and whatnot, but I’m always surprised how many things change, how many friendships turn out differently — it’s a remarkably prescient decision at an early time.

It’s after those two huge divergences are taken care of that we come to the sheaf of worlds wherein we meet. Though we don’t share any classes, we work together, and thus we become good friends in most of these worlds. I’d say all, but I’d say it with a sort of look on my face, and then I’d try to fix it, and then she’s say something like ‘you need to fix your believable face’ and then we’d both laugh about it as I agreed. But I’m getting off topic; the point is that in the worlds where we don’t get along, it’s usually because I’m being an ass. 

You know, like usual, except that I’ve always had the luck of friends like her who could see past it. But that’s neither here nor there, either.

What’s here, though, right at this tributary of the giant stream, this is where it gets interesting, where the smaller tendrils of time cross and weave and create a mesh and interchangeably arrive at roughly the same place — I think it telling that even though hundreds of small details may be different (shifts we had together, time spent talking, what we were respectively better at, who we fired, which restaurant we’d drink together at...) the flow, as it were, is enough to keep us going in the same direction, in contact with one another.

But when my path changes sharply, as I change jobs pretty rapidly in a year, she follows at first... and then my path changes again, and that’s where it gets tough, and the timelines get pretty murky.

See, in some of them, she follows, and in some of them, she doesn’t, and our paths start to diverge — not much, but in a year or two, it’ll be quite different from a year ago, even if it’s still pretty close. And then a year after that, the decisions change even more things, and it’s impossible to tell anything with any probability. Prognostication isn’t an exact science; hell, it’s not even much of an art.

Anyway — in some of these timelines, she stays where she is, a single, strong thread that is relatively alone but shines on without much support until it draws others out of the area around her; in others, she retreats back to where she grew up, and curls around her family and the friends that are back there, taking strength and giving strength in equal parts. But those two options aren’t the majority.

The majority of them involve staying where she is now and dimming after a bit, after more than a few tries to change and join the other recent strands that have gone out West recently. It looks like she’s rebuffed, time and time again, and she loses hope after more than a reasonable number of tries. Those timelines join with the others, but they’re less bright — at least for a little while. Those are the majority.

But there’s also a sizable minority of potentialities where she does make it out with the others that have cast away from their homes, and it’s almost like nothing changed after college, except, of course, that they’re all changing the world now. In some of those, she takes a retail job first, in others, she moves down with her aunt, but in all of them, she takes a risk, leaps into the air...and forgets to fall, instead soaring with the others.

Granted, it’s only a minority of worlds where this happens.

But here’s the thing, the crux, the takeaway, the Truth with a capital T and an iron edge to it:

She has two things going for her, more than other people.

The first is her support structure. One of her friends may be kind of an ass, one of them is still emotionally twelve, and one of them is pretty obsessed with snow...but they play their parts. And of her sisters, one is in a tough spot, another one has drifted some, and another she didn’t really honestly care for that much...but they’re her sisters, in the end. And for her family, well, her family ties are better than most, and full of good advice. This makes a big difference.

And the second is herself — but everyone has themselves, you may be saying, and  ‘excuse me, can I finish?’ — she learns, which not everyone can claim. She’ll take a situation, in any of these worlds, and come out better for it, whether it’s going back down to the base position to learn new technical skills, moving away from everyone and then learning about what it means to live by yourself in a foreign land, or learning that making toilets isn’t what she wants to do for the rest of her life. She grows and adapts and changes and learns and loses — pounds, that is — because she has the discipline to do so.

So however it turns out, she’ll be okay, because she has herself, and us. No matter which future happens, it leads, always, into another one, a brighter one, the one that she wants to be in. It doesn’t always come easy, but it always comes: for the one of her that struggles with school, for the one that doesn’t get everything easily, for the one that can’t get into the job she wants, all of it is temporary. All the timelines flow upwards, even when a bell-shaped curve should see some of them go down.

It’s remarkable, really. Or maybe it’s just something that the rest of us should aspire to, because we all should have such powers. Hypothetically, at least. We don’t all have someone looking over the timelines and doing analytics on them, of course, but I could be persuaded— oh, right.

Here’s the thing to keep in mind. Because she learns, all she has to do is not give up. If you think about a situation where there are infinite versions of you, and you keep learning after every experience — well, even if you’ve failed, there’s a world in which you’ve already picked yourself up already, and gone on to do better things. And if you think about it as following footsteps that are already present... well, aren’t the easiest shoes to fit in your own? The possibilities, really, all collapse into one equation, where life might set her back, but she doesn’t let it keep her back — and as well she shouldn’t.

All she really needs to do is be herself, and there’s really nothing she can’t do. Or, you know, hasn’t done, or won’t do. Time’s a bit weird like that.