Ten Years

I had a dream weekend before last—Halloween night, actually, though Halloween was a non-event here, with us hiding in our bedroom with all the outside and downstairs lights off.

The dream was fragmentary, as they so often are. I was out in the cul-de-sac in front of our house, and looked up at our house, which was cycling through variations: different siding, slightly different trim, different landscaping, differently aged trees; sometimes even no house at all, just a grassy lot.

I somehow knew this was a multiverse thing. The multiverse is a theory that we inhabit just one of a huge number of universes, each different in at least one way, superposed on each other—existing simultaneously. The variation can be as major as some different law of physics, or as minor as whether you had eggs instead of a bagel for breakfast this morning. Every choice has the potential to split off another branch. Some of those may even fold back into each other—for example, if you had the bagel today and the eggs tomorrow vs. the opposite, with no permanent effects; in another branch, you forgot the eggs on the stove and burned the house down.

The idea of the multiverse has been used a lot in science fiction, but it turns out to be part of current scientific theories about the actual universe. This article covers it reasonably coherently; their #4, “Daughter Universes”, is the flavor I’m talking about above.

Anyway, back to the dream: I was standing there watching the house cycle, and a car pulled into the cul-de-sac and stopped, and Katie got out. Not the Katie we last knew: this one was several (ten?) years older, although I don’t know how I knew that. She said something to me in passing—I don’t remember what—and headed into the house.

And that’s all I remember, alas.

 

In such a strange year, I’ve thought even more than usual about what she’d be like now. So many of her friends have “real lives”: married, careers, homes far away. Of course our girl is frozen in our minds, and I keep wanting to talk to her about the pandemic, and the election, and stuff in general.

Next universe please.

Excellent quote

From American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins:

In the months to come, Luca will sometimes wish he hadn’t squandered these early days of his grief. He’ll wish he’d let it pierce and demolish him more. Because, as the forgetting part takes anchor and stays, it will feel like a treachery. He’ll mistakenly believe it’s his own cowardice erasing Papi’s details—the mole above his left eyebrow, the tight, rough little curls of his hair, the timbre of his voice when he laughs, the sandpaper feel of his jaw against Luca’s forehead when they read together at night in Luca’s bed. But Luca doesn’t know any of that yet, nor does he know that, no matter what he does right now, that creeping amnesia is inevitable, it’s not his fault.

I thought this captured nicely how the feeling of distance from a grief event makes you feel bad about that distance, even as you recognize and appreciate its benefit.