Going back to bed, still fuzzy with a cold that has lasted several days, and which keeps returning, unwelcome – I am imagining my life differently, as I do so often: what if that had happened, what if I could intervene here, what if I had chosen to do this instead, what would have been my ideal vocation, the career that would have worked out beautifully. A favorite game, though admittedly a somewhat desperate and pathetic one.
The extended dreamscape that ensues is strange and unexpected – but perhaps entirely, if cruelly, deserved: unrolling with the apparent narrative clarity of a 1960s film, it is full of the unexplained and incomprehensible – is this some film colony, some coastal resort? Why is this alternate-history version of me, this as-if me, doing all these inexplicable things – driving this bulging 1940s car with two children, lying by a pool chatting with women in lounge chairs? Although the surface seems coherent, nothing quite makes sense – time is dislocated, people who should be long dead interact with this as-if me, there is no possible clarification of the generations. The I who observes, the me from this world, unshaven, gaunt, and in pajamas, after three days of being sick in bed: hiding behind bushes, afraid of being caught, of asking too many questions that lead up to the key question: what does he (what do the as-if I) do, what is his life made of, what is he known for?
Since too many questions would lead to this haggard alien being, from another timeline (from our own timeline), being imprisoned, thought mad. A painful if understandable judgment, a reminder of something I already know: as we are told over and over by so many wise people, you can only live the life you’ve got, play the hand you’ve dealt; and therefore the ridiculous game of imagining a life spent playing a different hand can only lead to incoherence, disorientation, confusion – hiding….
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