Kathleen, Kay, Kate, Kathy-how could I have been all of them? And all at the same time? Not for the first time do I wonder if all these lives and timelines are the products of my own insanity. Maybe that’s my mind, trying to protect itself.

The colors bleed away, leaving indistinct people with blurry faces. The edges curl and the images grow faint. My memory is fading, like an old photograph left too long in the sun. I flip through the notebook, noticing the names-Kathleen, Kay, Kate, Kathy. I open it to see my own handwriting, the back-slanted sprawl of a leftie. A neon green sticky note screams: Read me. There’s another note, bottom center of the mirror. Remember what? Remember who? And what’s this about a notebook?

I relax when I see my reflection: shoulder-length brown hair, eyes normal-well, normal for me, anyway, since one is brown and the other green-and my face clearly focused. I wobble to the bathroom, my knees fighting the adrenaline rush that woke me.

And my face, my face, was out of focus, phase-shifted, like a double exposure with two images badly superimposed. My hair for one thing, chopped and spiked and dyed deep blue. What a freaky dream, one where it was me in the mirror and yet not me. We can only imagine where our lives would lead us, had we made different choices along the way. What if there were multiple copies of you, living out permutations of your life in an infinite number of realities? Call it what you like: multiple universes, the multiverse, parallel universes-quantum theory suggests they could exist.īut we humans, with our limited powers of perception, are locked into knowing only one reality at a time.

Choices by Deborah Lynn Jacobs