June 29 - A Thousand Million Billion Trillion Selves

We stand, once again, at a delta.

It is impossible to count the branches on the tree of reality.

Every choice, a new split, a new self.

A new version of me.

And many of these selves are nonsense, degenerate cases.

The versions of me where I choose to swerve into traffic and die instantly aren’t particularly interesting.

We trim these branches from the tree.

Dead limbs.

Dead weight.

I think about them.

The thousand, the trillion.

Each is different.

Many meaninglessly so.

But so many run the gamut of who I am.

A thousand researchers, ten thousand line cooks, a hundred and fifty thousand actuaries.

They span genders, they span sexualities, they span wardrobes and identities.

In the tree there is a single branch.

A single ant swallowed in the vastness of a galaxy.

I see the one who lives that life.

I’ve sworn off jealousy forever.

But I’m jealous of him.