Parallel Paths

Have you ever wondered how your life might have been different?

Wondered what-if..., or 'if I had just...'? Looked back at a decision, large or small, and considered what would have changed if you'd chosen differently? Life is like a river, filled with forks and branches and offshoots of what might have been.

I don't have to wonder.

I see the might-have-beens in my dreams every night.

To see the future is a great burden, because there are thousands of possible futures, pruned down by the choices we make until one is left, which then branches out again. To try and divine how to reach the most desirable future, and to take the weight of consequences caused and averted, is not easy. It can be no wonder that Seers are often driven mad by their visions.

To see the past, the futures that no longer exist and can never come to be, is perhaps even harder.

It is very hard to wish for something to be different, when you can see what would have happened as a result.

I see lifetimes where I was diagnosed younger. In those realities, no one expected anything of me, outside of my family, and I was written off as a burden on the taxpayer. I didn't get the chance to prove I was more than that, because my disability was the first thing anyone saw about me, and the only thing they cared about. Lack of a diagnosis was traumatic, but being diagnosed before the support I needed was in place for me was worse, and I fell far enough that there was no rising from the pit.

Once, there was a future, where a loved one didn't die, where they were found in time, and brought back. That future is no more, but I saw how it played out. They never truly recovered, and were not the same after, and the people around them never achieved the personal growth and closeness brought on by grief. What the Fates have decreed shall be, is very difficult to countermand.

Was that once-future truly better, for the light that never left it? Or were the shadows that followed what made the light seem brighter in the first place? It is difficult to say.

There were futures where I remained blind to my own truths. Where I was so convinced of what I had been told, that I never dared to step outside the box I had been pushed into. In some of those futures, I was a recluse that people spoke about occasionally, but rarely saw. In others, my life ended much sooner than it should have. In most of them, I never dared to try to make friends again, after the disasters of my youth, and my life was very lonely indeed.

Not all of my might-have-been futures were quite so desolate. There were some that, by some miracle of fate and fortune, everything worked out for the better, though not without trials. There were some futures that were a see-saw of extremes. Great suffering and great happiness in equal measure, but those lives careened wildly between one or the other, with little opportunity for rest or relaxation.

I do not miss the constant state of adreniline in those could-have-been futures.

There is one wish that I still have: A wish for a world where I no longer dream what should have, might have, could have been. Where I know only the past that was, and can wonder what would have been, without knowing it.

Sometimes, I think that humans are fortunate in their ignorance.

I wish that I were so blessed.

One day, I will enter a Challenge before the literal last seconds before the deadline, but it will not be this day...