Me Vs. Me. Sarah Mlynowski
have told you yesterday when it just happened?”
“You told me. Don’t joke. You don’t remember?”
“How could I have told you? You’re pulling my leg. Was it on the wire? There better not have been a reporter there. I was in my bathrobe. Do you need a quote?”
“No.” My head hurts. How is this possible? I spoke to my mother and she told me about the fire alarm. Yesterday. Or today. Am I living each day twice?
“Anyway, Gabrielle, I’m upset with you. How you could get engaged is beyond me. How you could get engaged without telling me is despicable.”
This is way weird. My mom told me about the fire alarm yesterday. Yesterday. “I’ll call you later,” I tell her and hang up. I look up at Cam.
He’s looking at me strangely. “What was that all about?”
“Nothing,” I murmur. “You know my mother. Sometimes she makes no sense.”
“Didn’t she want to talk to me? You know? Congratulations? Welcome to the family?”
“I’ll be right back.” I hurry to the bathroom. I close the door firmly and press my back against the door. My head pounds.
When did this craziness start? When was the beginning of my double life? I retrace my mental steps. Today is Sunday in Arizona. I’m engaged. Yesterday was Sunday in New York. I wasn’t engaged. The day before that was Saturday in Arizona. I woke up in the desert. We had brunch at Alice’s. The day before that was also Saturday in Arizona. I also woke up in the desert. I told Cam I didn’t want to marry him. I finished packing.
So what happened the night before that?
I shut my eyes firmly and try to visualize the night in question. The night that Cam proposed. The night we were lying in the back of the truck, watching the falling stars.
It can’t be. It can’t.
My wish? My wish. I wished I didn’t have to choose. That I could live both lives. Stay with Cam and move to New York. Have it all.
I sink to the bath mat. It’s not possible. Is it? How else can I explain what’s happening? How else can I rationalize how I’ve been living two separate lives?
I tell Cam I need to borrow his truck to return to my place to pick up a few last-minute things.
“Like what?”
“Clothes, makeup…not that I have anywhere to put any of it.”
“I’ll make some space.”
Instead of going to my apartment, I stop by the emergency room to see if there is something wrong with my head. Like a brain tumor. After a few hours, I finally get to see a doctor.
“Lately, I’ve been existing in two universes,” I tell him. “Is that a psychological condition?”
He rubs his chin, looks into my eyes with a flashlight and asks me if I’ve been under a lot of stress.
“A little,” I say.
“You look okay to me,” he says. “Try to get some sleep. Do you want antibiotics?”
“No thanks.” I decide not to tell him the whole story. It’s not like he’s going to believe me. If this is real and I’m not going bonkers, then someone else in the world must have gone through this, too. Someone who can tell me how to make it stop.
Back in my old apartment, I get comfy on the futon, laptop on my knees, and try to figure out what the hell has happened to me.
I Google multiple lives and get over forty-three million hits. There are mentions of reincarnation, cats and, inexplicably, real estate. But nothing about my weirdo predicament. I try alternative lives and get another thirty thousand hits. Most of these are scenarios of regret. About what could have/would have/should have been. Then I land on something called Many-Worlds Interpretation. According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse, many-worlds is defined as: “…an interpretation of quantum mechanics that proposes the existence of multiple universes, all of which are identical, but exist in possibly different states.” Different states? Does that mean parallel universes?
I keep reading and reading and my heart pounds louder with every click, with every article. “These different states are caused by a divergence that splits the universe into two.” I discover that there is a whole theory in quantum mechanics (whatever the hell that is) that believes that whenever there is a choice, or a possibility, reality splits into a new world. Therefore, there is a new independent world for every different possibility. Anything that could happen does happen. There are books and information about this theory all over the Internet. There are over twenty thousand hits on this on Google. People have done experiments on this theory. Real scientists.
Could this really have happened to me? Yes. Yeeessss. My life verged the morning after Cam proposed. I’m not crazy. I am not crazy! What happened to me has been written about! Wahoo! Perhaps there’s a support group?
I get slightly nervous when one of the sites says that communication between these distinct universes in not possible, because I am, in fact, communicating with myself.
I search for another hour without finding anything specific. Not that it would help. Even though there are thousands of pages about many worlds, they’re all theoretical. There aren’t any real-life examples. As though no one else has gone through anything like this.
No one except me.
I keep reading and searching and end up seeing a lot of phrases like wave function collapse and relative state, which make me wish I’d taken a science class in college. I spend the next three hours searching until my eyes are tired. I type in green light, headache and wish, but still, nothing.
I close my computer and lie back. What I’ve learned today is that while there are lots of theories about multiple lives, no one has ever written an account of it happening. But if so many people have thought about it, written about it, and theorized about it, isn’t it possible? You can’t rule something out just because it can’t be proven, can you? There are like a million religions and none of them can be proven!
If the many-worlds theory is true, then everyone exists in multiple universes. There are many versions of me around, right now. There are many versions of everyone around, right now. Whenever anyone has to make a choice, a new version of her or him pops up. There’s a me who never dated Cam in the first place. There’s a me who went away to UCLA. There’s a me whose parents never divorced.
That seems a bit insane. There can’t be an infinite number of mes. Can there?
As a kid, I remember asking my dad how many stars there were. Living in California, he thought I meant celebrities and asked me if I meant movie, TV or both. When I clarified that I meant stars in the sky, he laughed and said, “It’s infinite.”
“How can that be?” I asked him.
“They go on forever and ever.”
“But how?”
“That’s just the way it is,” he said, playing with my hair. “Space, time, stars—they all go on forever.”
If all those things are infinite, then why can’t versions of people be infinite, too? Why not choices? And if so, did I somehow stumble into the ability to exist in two of these worlds?
Or maybe I just stumbled into the ability to remain conscious in two of these worlds.
At four, I hear Lila’s key in the door. “Hi, guys,” she says.
“It’s just me!” I holler, closing the laptop. As nonjudgmental as she is, she’d still think I was nuts.
Lila goes through her cleansing/changing routine and then joins me in my room. “What happened to you? I thought your flight was this morning. Where have you been? What’s going on?” she asks, sitting on the side of my futon.
I