One of my favorite movies is The Fountain. It explores parallel timelines. The multiverse. How one decision and act can change the outcome on multiple planes of time.
Recently someone taught me about quantum immortality.
It’s one of those ideas that maybe sounds a bit insane when you first hear it but then it sort of settles into your bones. At least it has mine.
The very simplified version is this: every time there is an event with multiple possible outcomes, reality branches and according to quantum immortality, you can never experience the timeline in which you die.
Your consciousness just keeps going. I’m not sure I believe that.
Maybe every possibility doesn’t happen. Maybe they all do. Maybe none of this works the way I imagine it does. But I think about it because there are timelines I can imagine very clearly.
There is a timeline where a man almost killed me. I don’t say that dramatically. I don’t say it for shock value. I say it because there was a moment in my life when another human being came terrifyingly close to making sure there wouldn’t be an after.
But there was, somehow, an after.
And there is another timeline I think about. The one where I almost killed myself. That one is a little harder to write. There was a version of me who was so tired that she didn’t want an after. She didn’t want another morning. Another problem. Another thing to survive.
She just wanted it to stop.
Sometimes I wonder if somewhere, somehow, it did.
Maybe there is a timeline where he killed me. Maybe there is one where I killed me. Maybe there are a thousand versions of this story where I never got any further than those moments. I don’t know.
I do know that in this timeline, I’m glad God doesn’t listen to me. I get to keep going.
Because I had no idea how beautiful life could become.
Not perfect.
I want that distinction made because I hate the version of survival stories where someone walks through hell and is rewarded with a life where nothing hurts ever again.
That isn’t what happened. Life still hurts sometimes.
People still disappoint me. I still disappoint myself. Things end. Plans fall apart. Money gets tight. Grief shows up uninvited. Sometimes I wake up already exhausted by the thought of participating in my own life.
There are still days when everything feels heavy.
But heavy isn’t the same thing as hopeless. I know that now.
This life also has mornings where I leave the house while the rest of the world sleeps just so I can stand on top a mountain and watch the sun come up. It has laughter that makes my stomach hurt. It has music played loudly. It has people I love.
It has plans scribbled into calendars and places I haven’t seen yet.
It has moments so ordinary I probably have overlooked them once. Or twice.
A good meal.
A long drive home.
A quiet house.
The moon.
There was a time I couldn’t imagine wanting more life.
Now, I’m greedy for it. I want to see how many different versions of myself I get to become.
Maybe that’s why this multiverse idea has settled itself into my bones – because there is something strangely comforting about imagining all those branching roads.
All those versions of me. All those places where the story might have ended and then looking around at the one I’m standing in – this messy, inconvenient, heartbreaking, breath taking life – and I get to keep going.
And that’s really fucking beautiful.