Many Paths to the Sea
We are sitting on the porch, talking about the future. Through the trees, silver light was winking off the lake.
Alayna said that she believes in fate––thinks about it like a wave, the swelling of environment and interaction––so its cresting and its crash are an inevitability. It could not have been any other way.
In that moment, I thought, instead, of a delta. Destinies branching and spreading in parallel. Each rivulet diverging from its siblings as it carries forward. At the end, a spill of self into sea. The same journey, but a thousand thousand ways to get there.
It brings me comfort to think of those other paths not as dead, un-lived ends, but as alternate lives running in parallel to mine. Almost so I could reach out and touch them.
When in a particularly spiritual mood, because of the afternoon light or someone on the subway platform playing a violin, I look around and think to myself that maybe we are all just water, making our way downstream.
Next to my thousand thousand streams run a thousand thousand more––yours maybe or that guy over there's.
I am the bit of the universe experiencing this reality and you are the bit of the universe experiencing that one. Together, we take all the paths and meet again at the water's edge.