A Multidimensional Life

The blue light of the Facebook page is cold. It is a strange sun for a forest. I sat in the room and looked at the profile, watching the names and the tiny circular faces fixed there like leaves on a map. At sixty-three, I saw the Great Tree for what it was. Most people are mistaken about trees. They think a tree is a flat thing, like a drawing in a book or a simple genealogy chart, where one branch splits into two and then four. It is a simple lie for people who want to feel like they understand the world.

​In reality, the page was thick. It was a pressurized explosion in every direction at once. It reached out horizontally into the world I inhabit now. It climbed vertically through the sixty-three years I have left behind. It cut diagonally through the architecture of time, where a ghost from a 1979 basement party suddenly appeared in the "Friends" list next to a person I met at a grocery store checkout three years ago. These are the knots in the wood. They are hard, and they are real.

​I clicked through and found a branch that started much earlier, tucked away in an old digital album. It was a sturdy limb that grew straight toward a sky I never reached. It was the branch of the picket fence and the Friday nights at the young people’s group. It was a life of scripted stability and a god who stayed in His place. In that dimension, I am a man who stayed in the town where I was planted. There is no messy evolution there, only a long, slow repetition of the same good habits. I am a pillar of something. I am a coordinate in a world that never shifts.

​Then I saw her name on the page. She was a branch that had been pruned, and I was the one holding the shears. It was my own choice to leave. I had made a mistake, the kind of mistake a man makes when he is young and thinks the forest is infinite. I walked away, and in that moment, I planted a seed for a version of my life that I would never get to live. If I hadn’t made that mistake, the canopy above me on this digital map would be an entirely different shape. So it goes.

​These other lives did not vanish into the trash bin of history. They exist in a shimmering, hyper-dimensional space just behind the monitor, branching and twisting in humping dimensions that were never meant for a human eye. I am sixty-three years deep into a timeline that is crowded by the presence of these alternate men. They are there on the sidebar—men with silver hair and a certain peace in their eyes that I traded for the storm.

​I walk around with a three-pound piece of meat in my head. I call it a "brain." I expect this modest organ to house the sheer, infinite volume of every choice I ever made and every choice I didn't. It is a very small bucket for a very deep well. My brain wants to tell a simple story about why I left the group or why I left her—a story that lets me sleep at night. It wants a straight line.

​But the page knows better. The tree knows that I am just a coordinate in a four-dimensional explosion of "could-have-beens." I am the architect of a sculpture that grows in every direction. I feel the heavy gravity of the years I lived, and I feel the light, itchy weight of the picket-fence dreams and the woman I left behind. The soul does not stop evolving; it just gets more crowded. I am the center point where the vertical climb of my history meets the horizontal reach of my community and the translucent branches of every life I almost led. It is a big tree, and the room was very quiet.