Parallel

What kind of person can you imagine being in a parallel world? Is there an alternate life you can see yourself inhabiting—or becoming?

For me, I often imagine a universe in which I’m not on the autistic spectrum. It’s challenging to talk about this without being a downer. I also don’t want to make others on the spectrum feel like it’s a flaw or an extraneous trait to be pruned away. I think, though, that it’s important to be honest about my disability. And, honestly, there are many days I wish it wasn’t rooted into my DNA. I imagine a parallel world to move freely throughout. A place where I can drive, take off on road trips, and leave home by myself to make it further than just down the street.

I’ve had this condition since birth. As a child, it was less noticeable to me because most children have limited freedom. I also lacked the self-awareness to see it was much more pronounced back then.

Living on the spectrum can be like living as a message in a bottle. Transparent, inescapable, and easily cracked, but I can last so much longer than expected. I bob around on others’ tides to travel. My message is carefully kept, and it says something new every day.

I can fantasize about having alternate lives as an independent professional or a wanderer who travels just as far physically as she does mentally. I can live vicariously through other selves. Sometimes it feels pointless, but other times it helps. It makes a difference upon the realization that some of the things I daydream about can be done in this world, too. A bottle floated across the ocean to let me know I don’t need it. To say that sometimes the distance can be walked, too.

I don’t want to frame this topic only around myself. Who do you believe you could be in another reality, whether good or bad? Is there another version of you that could have existed if you’d changed a life decision or been born under different circumstances? And, when you find the more desired options within other universes, is there a way to carry any of them into yours?

You don’t have to tell me; just think about it. And, if you do want to share an answer but not on a comment thread, you can message me privately. Whoever you are.

Let’s talk about this.

Time-traveling and piracy

What if every single astronomically successful songwriter, author, or inventor is a time traveler from the future who ripped off someone else's idea, and we're living in the alternate timeline in which none of the original creators get credit for their work? (Then again, have they really been cheated if they didn't come up with it in this universe, and they're hugely successful from it in the other?)

Reflections and echoes

In first or second grade, I came up with a fantasy about reflections and mirrors. It developed further throughout elementary school, but first came about when I was around seven. I imagined that everyone's reflection is an alternate version of themselves from a parallel world we see via the mirror—that everything in a reflection was really in that other place. And a reflection shows a reverse image because everything over there is the opposite of the way it is here, including ourselves. I decided every person had a polar twin, and their names were our names spelled backwards. Mine was Ylime (pronounced E-lime). These counterparts were necessary in order to understand ourselves because if we knew what we were not, than we'd know what we were. Windows and water surfaces were weaker portals into Opposite Land, because you only caught a partial view.

I'd sometimes study my reflection, watching to see if it blinked when I didn't blink or slipped up and moved in a different way. When there was a crack in a mirror, I'd pretend it was the Opposite People trying to break through from the other side. Part of me wanted to meet them, but I was unsure whether or not they could be trusted. When I did something I wouldn't normally do, I imagined it was Ylime influencing me. I thought the Opposite Peoples' goal was to come through and replace us because they hated being constrained to a life of copying our every move. They wanted autonomy. Whenever I had to turn around, I'd turn clockwise, because I feared that spinning counterclockwise would land me in the world behind the mirror and I would become my reflection instead of the "real me." If that happened, we would switch places and I'd become trapped.

At the same time, I wondered if the people in this world were really the reflections, and what we believed to be our mirror images were the original source. What if we were the ones trapped behind the mirror and didn't know it? What if truth and reality was the opposite of all we believed, because this was actually Opposite Land? How could anyone be sure?

When a mirror broke, I'd imagine what it would be like to step out into the other side and see everything for the way it was. And for a moment, I'd wonder whether that might be the way to freedom.