19: alternate realities, alternate timelines 💐
self betrayal, a refusal to commit, & all the "what ifs?" (october 2021)
Iteration #19 of this monthly letter full of feelings. This issue's theme is: ∙•・ ⚁・alternate timelines ・ ◦ ✸ ✧ ∙
A Time Traveling Feelings Letter (or, dispatch from the darkest timeline)
〰️〰️〰️ originally sent on Aug 11, 2022 〰️〰️〰️
I want nothing more than to know my dad. There have been times in my life where this has felt so painful that I crack and I weep and can't even speak about the fact that it won't be possible in this lifetime, on this mortal plane, in this existence (whatever way you want to put it). There are other times when I feel a little distance from that pain and it's easier to function & feel present in my current life. I feel more present right NOW as I'm writing this (August 2022), but the weight of it has been lingering in my psyche over the last year; so many moments where all of my cells were screaming: "it wasn't supposed to be this way."
I've been putting off this letter for a while, but here I am, trying. It feels urgent to get it out, partly because my paternal grandmother died this week and every day more life happens and compounds and stacks on top of what I'm already processing. Everything just keeps moving forward and I'm stuck. To get unstuck, I put on this playlist of songs that remind me of my dad (it's short. I wish it were longer).
An instant portal opens when I hear a song that I could imagine him dancing or singing along to, and the sharp pain of this reality pierces me.
I have a lot of trouble committing to this timeline: the one we're all living in right now (I'm assuming, if you're reading this, that you're living in this timeline too). I feel stuck in an accidental reality. I want to tell you what that feels like. Somewhere, at some point, my grieving child brain must have decided that there is an alternate reality where my dad didn't die, and eventually, someday, maybe, we can get there (we being my inner child & me). So by this logic, the timeline I'm living in right now is just secondary to this ...dare I say sacred?! timeline.
Part of me deeply believes that he wasn't *supposed to* die – it wasn’t supposed to be this way – and all of this *gestures wildly* is just an accident that I got trapped in. As if the life I'm living is some cosmic mistake, a glitch in the system, like I'm just not supposed to be here. Everything Happens for a Reason but where is this reason? Why didn't I get to keep him? Everyone says he was such a good dad and a good partner and a good person, so what fucking reason could there possibly be? (Don't attempt to find a reason for me, I'm not interested). It must be a mistake. Can I speak to the universe's manager? G–d makes no mistakes but idk... maybe this one slipped by? GOD, I just want to know what it would be like to have him here. I wonder what songs we'd associate with each other. I wonder if I'd have grown up with more singing, more more flowers. Less heaviness, more lightness. Definitely more dancing. If I can negotiate hard enough with reality, maybe I'd be able to fix it. I'd find the key to get back what I lost.
He was young, just turned 37. He had two babies and worked really hard to cultivate a loving family despite coming from a pretty toxic one. He was a compassionate but classically "bad" kid who got into lots of trouble, went into the military and came back an optimistic blue collar sweetheart with a factory job, a cute wife, and a small house. Mom and dad would take turns working day shifts & night shifts so that one of them could be home with me, their first kid. By the time my brother was born, my dad was already dying. He had a spot on his lungs you could see from an x-ray taken years prior, but no doctors had followed up on it. The cancer had gotten to his brain and made him feel symptoms that were deemed dramatic. They could have caught it years prior, but they just didn't.
He probably got cancer from unsafe working conditions in the factory he just happened to work at. He and my mom got to stay in the same hospital room when my brother was born. He spent the next year documenting, setting up the camera around the house, giving us the gift of memories our tiny brains wouldn't be able to make.
They told him he didn't have much time left, but he said he wanted to make it to Christmas, and he did. By that point, he could't really write, but he dictated these cards to someone who typed them for him (I think? Honestly, don't take any of this as fact – grief makes anyone an unreliable narrator). These letters read like poems to me. An artifact of someone taking stock of the life they have left, an archive of emotion that has always made me cry. And how romantic, to always be remembered by the sweet ways you said goodbye.
I always end up back here: why couldn't I just have had him around? Surely there is a way for me to play this game perfectly and unlock the secret level where I get to access the timeline he's still alive in, the ~correct~ timeline, the one that feels more real. If only, what if, who knows what I would be and who I would be and where.
I've always thought maybe my dad was "my person" – the one who would always understand me, advocate for me, really *get* my sensitivity. I guess it's easy to give him that role when I don't even know him. Easier than finding that in anyone that's actually here, let alone finding that force in myself. If I'm stuck then I don't have to have autonomy, then I don't have to commit, then I don't have to find ways to appreciate this timeline. I live with a lot of patterns of self-betrayal. I realize that, over time, I've gotten used to betraying my needs and desires since it wasn't supposed to be this way anyway. I wasn't meant to be here without my dad, I just wasn't. I don't want this! How could I want anything at all?
꩜ ANOTHER REALITY ꩜
For a while I thought there was nothing new I could say about grief. I said all of the surprising things I had been holding in for so long and nobody sent me away or disowned me. Of course, that only made room for more surprising feelings to come out of the cracks. Last July, I finally admitted that I feel stuck in the wrong timeline. I said it out loud to my friends and my therapist. I had entertained this thought before, in playful conversations, saying that if there were other timelines, maybe I'm not quite in the darkest one, but not quite in the prime one either. Somewhere in the middle – aren't we all? But it hadn't felt so real until last summer. Everything felt so wrong.
When COVID came into the picture, there was a jarring branch in the timeline we thought we were all living in. It happened for everyone in some way, big or small. As time passed and things didn't get easier, life started to feel more and more like a sloppily-written sitcom. Things kept happening that felt out of control. The more things kept changing since the pandemic, the more distance I felt from the timeline I had been building toward. My life didn't look like my life anymore. The unsettling thought in the back of my mind came pushing forward, it started echoing throughout my body louder and louder: "it wasn't supposed to be this way." I heard my mom say it, I heard my brother say it. Our lives had become something we didn't think they were supposed to be. If he were here, things would be different. Everything would be different.
SURVIVAL TOOLS AND ...COPING MECHANISMS?
Maybe it's a normal grief response – a fission in your timeline. Are we all walking around with thoughts of another us somewhere in another dimension where things didn't go this way? It is impossible to imagine that we are meant to live without, so we create a reality where we never had to. We let ourselves live there, one foot in our present reality and another in the less painful fantasy.
I know I'm not the only one that has these big "what if" anchors. I asked the question in my therapy stories back when I first started unpacking this belief. I felt really relieved, in a way, to read other people's version of this narrative. What if they had never met that abusive person, what if they hadn't been put up for adoption, what if they did or didn't say "yes" to that thing. A trauma or missed opportunity where everything branches off from. It's Nadia's Krugerrands in Russian Doll. If only, if only. If this one thing were different, everything would click. Of course, we all have things, but I had felt so alone and ashamed in my "crazy thoughts" and my "what ifs," and once I said it out loud, the shame lost it's hold on me. It's a lesson I'm always learning, over and over again.
This timeline belief could have been a coping mechanism that kept me alive this long. A paragraph in my little planner reads: we run programs that once kept us alive and protected. Those programs coded into us for survival have now become barriers.
Wait, have you seen Russian Doll? It's a groundhog-day type story about a woman (Nadia) who gets stuck in a loop where she keeps dying on her 36th birthday (the age her mother was when she died). For me, it'll be 37, and I know I'm not the only child of a ghost parent who just ~kind of~ feels like life ends at that age. It's surreal to imagine surpassing the age you've always associated with the end of a life, someone's final birthday. That's where it ends, so I shouldn't get too comfy here.
I feel punched in the face by the scene where Nadia is talking to her godmother, who says to her: "I look at you now chasing death down at every corner, and sweetheart, where is that gorgeous piece of you, pushing to be a part of this world?"
A WEDDING WITH A LOT OF FLOWERS
In this scene, my dad asks me: "are you gonna have a wedding with a lot of flowers?" This video used to get lost between heavy hitters like "everybody hurts" and "where is thump-kin." I landed on this vignette just a few days after telling Tommy that I didn't feel like we needed flowers at our wedding – after all, they're so expensive. Oh god, and then here's my father: knowing he's about to die and imagining the things he'll miss, taking inventory of the future weddings, families, babies. Everything stopped when I saw this. Wait, I'm not even supposed to be having a wedding, especially not a wedding without flowers. My dad won't even be there. Why would I even try?
Tommy and I got engaged in 2019. We spent a long time thinking about our wedding, which would fall perfectly on the weekend of October 2, 2021 – 11 years after the first night we kissed (we think), messy teenagers in a Brooklyn basement. We stopped planning because of covid. We didn't have the stability or the money or the space. I really loved the idea of that date being our anniversary. The date came and went. It was a perfect day; it would have been a great weekend to get married and have the wedding we'd talked about. It felt cruel and unfair that it didn't rain that weekend. At least then it would have felt like things were happening for a reason.
The date came and went. We grieved so much already, it felt silly to grieve a date that didn't even get to happen. We'll have a wedding eventually, and it'll be whatever it's supposed to be. I can change my mind about the flowers.
DAUGHTER DANCE AS ELEGY
Before I started really talking publicly (and even privately) about my grief, this video was the one thing that would always make me cry. It was the one representation of my entire experience of grief, packed up in two minutes & nine seconds. The closest I'd ever get to a father/daughter dance. It's one of those artifacts that my brain conflates with whatever memories I do or don't have from that time. I swear, somewhere in the locker of my mind, there's a glimpse of me looking up at him from my perspective. Memory is tricky.
That part at the end where he sings along “hold on, hold on,” then shouts “hold on, Bridge” plays on repeat in my head. I've watched this video a million times. It used to be all about pain, but now I see there are moments of hope.
HURTLING THROUGH THIS FLAWED TIMELINE
There's something about committing to this life that feels like betraying the life where my dad got to be here. There's this sense that if I were to leap in with both feet, I would close the door to any possibility of unlocking the glitch in the system. I know that, in reality, if there's any kind of world where my dad still exists in some spiritual plane or something, then he would be watching me, frustrated, wanting to grab me by the shoulders and say "C'mon, kid! this is your life! There are no portals opening to another dimension anytime soon! Dive in already!" I'm so afraid of betraying the alternate timeline, that I'm ultimately just stuck in a loop of self-betrayal.
It’s a constant challenge to have both feet grounded in this life, especially when things feel so wrong. I’m trying (and will keep trying) to play the hell out of the cards I’ve been dealt and not hold on too tightly to the other timelines. I wish I could remember our time together clearly; I know somewhere somehow it’s still in me, and maybe by jumping in to this reality, I can access that truth with more clarity.
I want to find the desire to make *this life* the ~prime timeline~ even though it hurts. To keep trying to choose life, choose optimism, give love, "hold on, Bridge," you know?
Next stop: learning how to be fully present and open in this universe, appreciating it for what it is and inching toward some sort of peace, some sort of relationship with my dad's memory instead of the what ifs.
What are your big what ifs? How do you stay tethered in this timeline?
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This newsletter was started in the Onondaga & Haudenosaunee + finished in the Munsee Lenape & Schaghticoke territory. To learn more about the stolen land you're occupying, visit native-land.ca ⋰
