Iterations

 Have you felt like you were being pulled to different directions (at least in your mind) by versions of you that could've possibly existed? Not a casual ‘what if’ grazing at the back of your mind, a stray thought that can get a very economical, opportunity cost-ish resolution (not that such thoughts aren't bothersome). As a kid, when I was studying, if I knew I had a particularly vexing subject or homework, I would keep the book under my bed — out of sight, out of mind, or at least out of the forefront of my mind.

But this pull is not like that, it's much more visceral - because the current version of you isn't formed yet, not completely. So the other versions of you are very real possibilities of what you can be in the here and now. A much more dangerous version of literary interstices. It feels like the other version of you is there and you can pull it into you. 

My primary school teachers have this version of a very annoying, talkative girl who should have talked way into some high power job. My higher secondary teachers are surprised that the quiet but smart girl is not engaged in academia. My former boss is surprised that I am not taking managerial roles. None of these versions are unfamiliar to me, yet they aren't mine to claim - what a solipsistic nightmare!

In the foreword of ‘Never Whistle at Night’, Stephen Graham Jones gives an excellent analysis of what makes stories so important to us. He talks about how they expand the borders of reality, allowing two simultaneous timelines to almost intersect. But to make the story a horror? He says, it needs more than an intersection - it needs recognition. You have been seen, and have become an interloper. He goes on with the eloquence of a writer to explain that the story then “stays in the base of our jaw, in the hollow of our chest, in the sway of our back”. So yes, a smidge more than a thought that can be shoved under the bed.

So do I think that my mind is a horror story or that possibilities are the scariest monsters there? Not really. All this was to say that I'll sleep when the voices get too loud. I wake up the next day and look at what's in front of me. If that's not too bothersome, I take that path. I'm not Robert Frost to take the path less travelled by. Sometimes the beaten path leads to the most beautiful meadows.