Hi!

Happy October.

I’m at a local coffee shop, listening to the baristas discuss what spices to put in the new sweet potato latte. They have all of the seriousness of sommeliers. Only in Southern California.

In honor of spooky season, this is about the phantom lives we could have led, or the ghosts of the people we might have been, in another world. Boo.

THE WORLD OF OCTOBER

One by one, pumpkins are appearing on porches. Little kids are thinking of their costumes and big, beautiful bags of high-fructose corn syrup are lining the shelves. Personally, I really just want to go read Mary Shelley in an abandoned graveyard on a bed of decaying leaves. We don’t have those, but if we did. If I went to college somewhere else, somewhere with history and old bones and changing leaves, maybe I really would be reading Shelley in a rusty graveyard, smelling rain in the air.

But I’m here, among the palm trees, in the life that I chose for these years. Which makes me think of alternative life lines, or what Cheryl Strayed in Tiny Beautiful Things calls “the ghost ships that didn’t carry us”. She writes,

“Every life, Tranströmer writes, ‘has a sister ship’, one that follows ‘quite another route’ than the one we end up taking. We want it to be otherwise, but it cannot be: the people we might have been live a different, phantom life than the people we are.”

“I’ll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”

-Cheryl Strayed Tiny Beautiful Things

PHANTOM LIVES

I love that she calls those alternate versions of who we could have been phantoms, for that is what they feel like to me. They are not merely fantasies that die and get replaced. They are born at the intersections of your life and then they continue on without you, as ghosts. You can’t ever see them, but you can feel them. I can feel the dead leaves of that graveyard that I might have read Shelley in if I went to college somewhere else. I can feel the warm jacket that I might have worn and the things I might have been thinking. I can feel the cold, dead air of that other life and all of it’s ghosts. I simply turn down a certain street or hear a certain song and one them comes out of nowhere and shouts, BOO! Remember me?

And underneath that, a little bit deeper, there lives the ghost ship of a different adolescence. I think of what it would have been like to grow up somewhere else, in a town where I would walk to high school and watch Halloween movies on Friday afternoons with the friends I might have had. I can hear a little brother annoying us. I can smell those toxic Pillsbury pumpkin cookies in the oven and hear the bare branches tapping against the windows as Hocus Pocus or Halloweentown play. I can feel the love of people I never met and the nostalgia for a life I never lived and I don’t know why. I don’t know why these images come to me with such strength, or why it is their memory that is perpetually laced with the smell of pumpkin spice. The memory of something that never happened, but might have, in another life.

The phantom lives that are most visceral in detail to me though, are the ones that very likely could have been real. The ones that are born out of specific decisions that you yourself made one day, the kind that steer your life one way or the other.

For example, I used to think about alternate life lines incessantly back in high school when I made the decision to walk away from the boy I was cosmically in love with for reasons that extend far beyond this post. I can still feel what the air felt like that day in early January, what I was wearing, and what I said when I walked away from him. It was an intersection that branched my life away from his, but in the opposite direction, ran the phantom line of a life intertwined with his. I couldn’t kill that phantom. It returned to me again and again for years as he weaved in and out of my life. I don’t wish to be on that ghost ship anymore, but for a long time, I waved and waved at it from the shore.

THE MULTIVERSE OF YOU

It’s probably why I’ve always been so fascinated by the multiverse theory, or the idea that there are an infinite number of worlds where every life you possibly could have had, gets played out. For every decision that you make, or so the theory goes, in another world, you make a different decision. The worlds begin to multiply, perpetually dividing like cells, until there is this entire universe of alternate lives, a universe that, in essence, contains the entirety of you.

I don’t think it has much scientific backing, but it remains one of the most talked about theories for a reason. I think that there is something comforting to the human mind about it. We like anything that allows for nothing to be lost. When we make decisions, we have to grieve the thing that we did not choose. We have to accept the loss of it. I cannot move to New York and still live in San Diego. I cannot begin that life without leaving this one behind. But in the multiverse theory, nothing has to die.

WHAT I KNOW

But of course, everything must die. As much as the phantoms wave to me from their ghost ships, as much as I look into the sky and wonder if there is another world, one where I don’t have the scars that I do, I don’t ever actually want to step inside of that world. If I didn’t have such weak friends in high school, if I spent my Friday afternoons at cozy houses watching scary movies instead of slipping under the bath water of my own life, I pretty much know for certain that I would not have grabbed onto books and writing in the way that I did. And then I might not have known what to major in. I might still be figuring it out, instead of graduating early. I might not ever have created the love child that is Spinning Visions. I might not know the things that I do.

I love my ghosts. They allow me windows into worlds I never knew, kind of like reading Harry Potter. But I do always still love this world more, if there was ever a doubt.

Happy Sunday. ❤

Love, m.

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