I Felt the World Shift

There are times when the world runs on more than one reality. Actually, this is probably always the case, but for brief periods, for whatever reason, we are able to experience it.

I’m sure you’ve seen it. The moment when you see what all reason and sanity tells you MUST be happening, yet your senses know perfectly well that something else is going on. I’m not talking about the paranormal. I’m talking about choices. Those moments when a decision is made and reality shifts, because you so clearly know it could have gone a different way.

I don’t know if this is true of every decision ever made. It does seem that even an infinite universe must get cluttered if that’s the case, but of course, my comprehension of infinity is quite flawed. I’m probably not a reliable witness for it.

No, it’s the decisions where time seems to slow. Where, when you look back at it, you can still see the seconds tick by, where you can reach out and put your finger on a moment and say, “Right there. That’s it.”

And whatever Might-Have-Been can be sensed darting around the corner, just out of sight, never to be found. At least, not in this reality.

I don’t know about you, but Might-Have-Beens can haunt me. The sense of another reality, of an “if only…” It’s not always my decision, either. Right now, my heart aches for those choices made by people close to me, when reality split. Is the other reality better? I don’t know. I can only sense that it was there and that, like a tangent, it went its own direction, leaving me with the knowledge that this reality is skewed. My heart knows it.

Eventually, reality will settle again into familiar comfort. It must be this way, for I don’t have the strength to forever reach for what might have been. This reality holds my existence, and in the end, this is what I must cling to.

My heart knows that, too.