I bet most people, at some point in their lives, wake up and think, "This? This is what happened? I just did this to the rest of my life? And I can never, ever, ever go back? What alternate universe did I just step into?"
It's an odd sensation, thinking that, somewhere in this infinite multiverse, there's a copy of you living out your real life, the one you planned on, the one you could have lived, the one you always thought you'd have, if only that one horrible mistake hadn't been made. I don't even believe the theory that there are infinite copies of us, really. But I still get a strong sense every once in a while like I'm living in one of those alternate universes, one of them where everything went wrong, one of them that the real Julia feels lucky she's not in, and lays awake at night feeling joyfully existential about it.
At some point, we're all Marty Mcfly, realizing time was split in two by a simple mistake. But we're all stuck without a time machine. We have to live in the dangerous, disgusting, corrupted version of Hill Valley, where your mom's being abused and your father is dead. We have no choice but to try and kill Biff, to clean up the city, one shattered window at a time.
It's interesting how absolutely linear and permanent time is, because our brains certainly don't tell us that it is. I've often heard people say, "It's so dumb how linear we assume time is. We're so narrow minded. Time is probably more like a circle or a sphere. We just can't comprehend that." And this is really funny, because I think it is almost the exact opposite.
Sure, time is more fluid than it appears to us, slowing down around mass, dilating at certain speeds, et cetera, but it most certainly only flows in one direction, and even if it fluctuates, once something happens, it NEVER un-happens. But our "narrow-minded" little brains try to tell us, "Time isn't linear. Time isn't linear. Just go back a few seconds. You can do it. You can do it. If we sit here and think hard enough, time will bend to us. We can change the past."
Fact is, we're not narrow minded at all. (At least not, of course, in this respect.) We live in a rigid situation, a universe that always follows the rules, and yet our minds aren't held to any of the rules. We can romp around in the future, we can fly around the past, we can imagine the origin of the universe. And what's more? We even try to go BEFORE the beginning of the universe, to see beyond that boundary, even though according to the universe, that's just a big no-no. There probably wasn't time at all before then, there probably wasn't anything. How dare we try and go there!
But our brains don't care about breaking the rules. We have modeling software in our heads that allows us to make up places with completely different rules than the rules responsible for creating our heads. Every night we imagine places with no rules at all. Don't ask me how that's possible.
So I guess what I'm saying is, sometimes our devastatingly creative, impossibly imaginative minds make us stupid and naive. Because we feel invincible. Our brains tell us we're not subject to the rules here. Anything that goes wrong can always be undone. This delusion is amplified when we haven't experienced much pain. Sure, we can see the pain of others on the surface, think we understand it, think that secretly they must want it in some way, that they chose it, secretly they're just amplifying it for dramatic effect, but pain is not as bad as it seems, people are all just cowards, I can handle it, those rules don't apply to me, I can choose to be stronger.
So we do it: that moment of weakness, that moment of pride, that moment of selfishness, carelessness, stupidity, inattentiveness, lack of foresight.
And in that moment we feel our lives rocketing off the path they were on, our surroundings are the same and yet suddenly unrecognizable, and the pain hits you. And you find out pain is so, so much worse than you thought it would be. Because for a while you try and go back in time, over and over. Just a few seconds. That can't be so hard. Just a few minutes. Just a few days. Go back a month, you can do it. But it's a complete lie. You're fixed in time like cement. You can't even go back one millisecond. How's that for powerless. It's not the immediate painful consequence of the mistake you just made that is so bad, it's the understanding that now everything is different than it would have been, there's an entire other* reality that you have to bury and mourn, and you're completely out of control. The lasting consequences were something you never even saw coming. Or, you should have, if you weren't so stupid.
Either pain finds you in this life and you become wise, or it doesn't, and you're so stupid and naive that you create it for yourself. And then, you become wise.
Welcome to your Alternate Universe.
*(See, there's a way out of saying "whole nuther.")
