Still trying to figure out who I am, and how I got here. Where is here, anyway? New England? Or on this very human plane of existence, in the collective consciousness within ourselves and our ancestors? Too deep? Yeah, that’s why I have no idea where I am, or how I got here. Wherever here is.
Four decades of living and dreaming, and I’m still not sure I know the answer. But I’ll never stop seeking. Sometimes, I wonder if I’ll find the answer in my past. Or, if the answer lies ahead of me, in the future. I know my faith keeps me seeking, and when I’m feeling a little too lost, I pray for a better understanding of here, or sometimes there. Wherever that is.
I was an avid reader by age ten. Not just Judy Blume, but whatever I could get my little hands on. Luckily, my parents and siblings were all readers, so there was never a shortage of books in our house.
My mother liked reading about medical mysteries, near-death experiences, and a variety of self-help books (cue my early fascination with Dr. Moody, and later Dr. Alexander and Dr. Parnia). My father enjoyed Hawking, Einstein, Nietzsche, and other famous scientists and philosophers. My older sister had plenty of YA novels, and my brother was a connoisseur of comic books. So, I grew up with a pretty diverse library.
By the time I was 12, I’d been published twice in the Anthology of Poetry by Young Americans. In High School, I was published in Parade magazine. And looking back, yes, I had dreams of writing but …oh my cringe. Let’s hope those previous writing credits don’t see the light of day. Sigh.
But even worse than my early writing was the fact that young adulthood set in, and I stopped wandering in forests. I stopped writing for a time. I had college to attend, a budding career in clinical laboratory science, marriage and babies on the brain.
By age twenty I was working in the medical field, and I was given a few opportunities to utilize my love of writing within the medical practice where I worked. By my thirties, I was getting paid to write guest blog posts and write and distribute patient education newsletters. My writing was a small side-job but satisfied my need to continue to put my words onto paper.
Eventually, I had my second son, and between two children and my day job, something had to give. So, I gave up professional writing for a time.
But I continued to read.
And dream.
Maybe it was the reading. Or the social anxiety. Or just who I am, but I’ve always conjured up stories in my daydreams to escape stress. And this continued well into adulthood. When my husband was deployed, when I was up all hours of the night with a newborn, when the pandemic hit. I never stopped dreaming up stories that started with one foot in our world, and one just lingering on the edge.
Every mundane moment, or stressful social situation, or quiet night before sleep, it would happen. I’d say the magic words, “Imagine if…” and then the journey through my mind would sweep me away to places where magic was real and where people could overcome mortality and illness and the boundaries of this world to limitless possibility.
From here to there. Where is there? My mind? Imagination? Or is any conceivable thought a tangible place and time in a universe somewhere of our making?
Some stories got jotted down over the years, many I didn’t. Many stayed hidden in my mind, never to be brought to life.
But then, one of those stories bloomed. I became fascinated, fixated; it took a decade, but 2020 was the year it clawed its way out of me, flowing into a completed manuscript that is due to be published in 2024.
Years ago, when I worked out-of-state and had a longish commute I would lose myself in music and the typical daydream stories. On a few occasions I found myself, like many who do lots of highway driving, in a close call incident. No accident occured, but a very intriguing thought struck me and became the focus of my “imagine if” series:
What if every close call actually happened?
Every near-accident. Every missed stair on that concrete stairwell. What if we really died, jumped into a parallel life, and didn’t remember the death? Those left behind are reeling our loss, but we continue on, inheriting all the memories of the new life we fell into at the same age. We now live alongside all of our friends, family and acquaintances who are living out their alternate realities.
From here to there.
Would this explain de ja vu? Would this explain the moments when someone we’ve known and trusted our whole life acts out-of-character or betrays us? Would this balance the scales a little? Maybe life is fair, in the sense that we’re all granted a minimum of 80 years to do anything of our choosing. Maybe we don’t spend all 80 years in one life, but living out the consequences of decisions we’ve made over the course of multiple parallel lives.
Is this where the urban legend of “our body is completely regenerated every seven years” emerged? Maybe we aren’t a new physical body every seven years. Maybe the average person dies once every seven years but doesn’t remember. Like real-time reincarnation, minus the whole starting from scratch thing. Instead of being stuck in one life, with the potential for only one set of decisions being made and manifested-are we given more than one chance to live the life made possible by just a few different choices?
Are we given different scenarios, different choices, and ultimately different outcomes, that test our character, our strength, our virtue all during a set of lifetimes within a multiverse?
So in that vein, I wrote Periphery and Charlotte and Simon were brought to life. Two characters who survived death, and in their miraculous resuscitation, remembered. Remembered their death, and their jump into the parallel. Resuscitation allowed them to face life with new abilities, a new outlook, and the danger of harboring knowledge of one of life’s greatest secrets. Death.
Living Multiple Lives?
Here and There
“Are we given different scenarios, different choices, and ultimately different outcomes, that test our character, our strength, our virtue, all during a set of lifetimes within a multiverse?“
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AA DaSilva 