Red pieces pepper from my son’s scissors, staining the white linoleum kitchen floor. Somewhere in the multiverse, the red isn’t paper. I imagine them as fish scales in this universe, autumn leaves in another, warning flags or trail markers or flower petals or blood drops.
A million billion different versions of myself and son, this moment playing just as many different ways. In my universe, he makes a fun sound, an ode to noise for noise’s sake sounding like a growling telephone ringing. I’m laughing at him, and everything is simple, yet I know somewhere else, everything isn’t, can’t be, has to be as terrible as this is great.
I let the tug at my heart sink through me. Like a drop of soap through oil and water, I pierce the resistance between refusal and surrender, sorrow doubled over despite not being mine. Nothing happened, not then, not ever. My son is fine; I hear him now.
But in some beyond, some place past imagining, there’s a me that’s screaming and I cannot imagine her pain, this stranger I know, this person so far and close to me. I imagine her how I imagine all strangers, as if I’m reading about them through a narrative and they might be so real if I hope enough or believe enough, and I wonder if there’s a difference.
I anchor vulnerability at my center like scaphism, sweet and vile. I am the boat and the victim, feeding myself the milk and the honey, feeding myself to the bugs and bees. Always overflowing because in that beyond imagining are other me’s who let themselves feel nothing, stifling emotion like water stifles a scream.
These other places, imagined and corporeal, right there, nowhere, everywhere. I might exist again out there, because if I’m only here, where do my unmade choices die? Does the path only exist if taken? Do choices run parallel in a neat stack?
I want to peel the layers of universes apart, to see every colorful piece, a voyeur above the endless sky. I wish I could touch them, reconstruct them, saying here, look, it’s real, it’s real; it’s not just what I feel. The human need for physical proof and the human dismay of emotional belief, and I wonder if there’s a difference.
Another growling telephone ringing sound shrieks from my son, snapping back my attention and emotional state. He laughs a wicked laugh, scissors tearing through more pieces of red. He is mad and awesome. Terrible and amazing with his noise and mess, destruction and creation. I don’t know if God is a 7-year old boy, but the multiverse is made of construction paper.