The dozens of possible lives I could have lived, each on their own trajectory in an alternate timeline. I imagine them like the lines in my hands, crisscrossed options and parallels and divergences. Some lives running obscenely parallel to the life I'm on, basically the same life over and over worn almost into a solid groove with tiny variations, the year where I planted mint instead of basil and every morning that summer felt fresh and awake and every night I had bourbon and sugar instead of a bowl of pasta salad. Some alternate life lines that meander too far off and end abruptly. That one there is the one where I become a cross-country truck driver and get addicted to amphetamines and dazzle the bosses with my boundless energy but I'm trying to get clean and one day I fall asleep at the wheel and that's the end of that line. Sometimes in dreams I wander into a house that feels like my house but isn't, an apartment building in a town where I don't live, a warmer place where I might have wound up if Brno hadn't caught my heart and held it in its crumbling fin de siècle hands.

Sometimes I think about all the tiny tiny steps we take for no clear reason, driven by the desire to be on a line we don't quite see, and we look back and call it coincidence or luck and discount the roles of self preservation and instinct. I used  to think about the possible better lives I might have been living if I'd done something a little differently: If only I had chosen another thing, everything would have been saved. But now I think: I did not do that different thing because I did not want to save everything. Or I knew there was nothing to save. Or: I saved myself. 

From time to time I am overwhelmed by a nameless grief, a certainty that I should not be here, don't deserve to be here, belong somewhere much worse. I feel the terror of being caught living the life I don't deserve, and this is nothing compared to the absolute abject sorrow that I feel at knowing I have to let it go. This feeling comes and demands my attention for periods of time and it is dead unpleasant. I have thought that perhaps it is my own way of reminding myself to be grateful and I do really try to be aware of the forces of luck and coincidence and wonder that have landed me here, in this life. And I try to acknowledge also the work I have put into getting here, to this life. But I know that hard work is not always the same as getting what you deserve. Two years ago the grief caught me on an airplane, tin can in the air, fist at my mouth, sobbing uncontrollably. Last week again, unbearable even while familiar. 

I am thinking about it a lot. I think maybe it's okay that I am here in this life. Maybe what I am feeling is one of those alternate lives, one much sadder than this one, coming close to me for just a moment, and I feel the grief to be mine as real as I know the house in my dream. It isn't mine. But it could easily be. And it is important to recognize it, walk in its rooms, touch the furniture. To experience the pain of it whole. Let it happen. And then, one hopes, wake up. 

When she was little, she wrote, there was a dried up creek bed on the walk home from school. The bridge no longer over the water but over the deep space that the creek left. Garbage-strewn mysterious depth. That's where the women fall, the fallen women. And I told how when I was little, the president had opened a gate and flooded Washington, the water coming out in leaks and then finally a torrent, and he had to resign in shame over the the water-soaked capital.

These are things we believed because we did not understand, and I know that sometimes this happens. And I know that sometimes one person says something and another person hears something slightly different, and their affection gets buried in misunderstanding as the argument moves further and further from the original point. So you're not arguing at all about what ought to argue about, if you should argue at all. But I think that such arguments are a reflection of some underlying other problem, the fight that takes on a life of its own already had a heartbeat somehow before your misunderstanding breathed life into it. Such misunderstandings are not the problem.

The taste of vinegar and salt. The snap of the crystal between your teeth before it melts on your tongue. The sour truth that pulls you awake.

Okay, I'm back to it. Things we believe because we misunderstood. Things we believe because we misheard. These can be eliminated with time and attention. Then there are also things we believed because we were told them directly, lies like who brings gifts and what happens to our teeth. I never told my son these things because I never understood why you should establish yourself as an unreliable narrator with your own kin. There are enough lies already in the world, and pretending they have colors is also a lie. So these beliefs can be avoided by not lying. And that applies to most belief, maybe. 

I work as hard as I can to be as honest as I can, and when I can't be honest yet or anymore then I stop talking. There are lies that come from a kind of dishonesty that is a lie to the self, perpetuated on others. I have no idea what to say about these people, except that I have at times wished holes burned or bitten through their tongues. Metaphorical ones, to be clear, although this is what I do to myself, have done to myself, the taste of blood in my mouth before saying what I wasn't sure was true. Mean what you say. And if you cannot, don't feign surprise when I don't stick around to listen anymore.

I, too, felt incredible anger when things were unfair. I felt unattractive and awkward, splotchy skin and itchy red sweaters and home haircuts. I wanted to win and it mattered and when I did not win I wanted to turn the world upside down. When I remember how I felt about her, I secretly admired that she did not care what people thought of her, and I wanted to not care like that. I also wanted to live in a cool house with thousands of rooms, I wanted to discover places and people, and I wanted to be able to express my feelings with magic. At the same time, I was terrified I was like her, truly ugly on the outside and pickled bitter on the inside.

I watched an old episode and felt my preschool self come rushing in, the same connection to her as always. I feel like I have grown into her in a lot of ways. And I feel like that is okay. I don't travel by spaceship to the planet Purple, but I get to California every year and that's about the same. I can whistle pretty well. I live in an apartment that is almost as magical as the museum-go-round. And the thing I didn't see when I was little but I see clearly now: I have people who treat me with patience and kindness even when I'm quite crotchety. Even though I didn't know it, maybe that was really the attraction all along. I'm so grateful for you, toots.

There is a short film I watched a few months ago, I think it's called Ten Meter Tower. The film shows a number of people who were offered a symbolic amount of money to jump off of a high dive at a swimming pool, which they had never done before.

The film does not show the people who did not participate because they had jumped off the board before. It does not show the people who had never jumped and were not interested in jumping. It does not show the people who got to the ladder, looked all the way up, and changed their minds. The film and therefore we are only interested in what happens to the people who actually make it all the way up to the diving board. Even there, it shows very few people who just get to the top of the board, run to the edge, and jump. It does not show people after they leave the board, and so you can only wonder how they continued, elegantly or otherwise, through thirty feet of air, plunging down into another six feet or so of water that may or may not have been very cold.

The film mostly shows the people standing at the top of the board hesitating, for various reasons, to jump. There is a part of them that wants to jump – the part that said sure, went to the pool, changed clothes, looked all the way up and still felt like trying; the part that felt the cold metal of the ladder pressing hard against the arches of their feet, all those steps to the top. But there is a part of them that is afraid. An animal part that does not want to fall, does not want to be hurt. Is so afraid that climbing back down the ladder, which is after all the only other way out, seems like possibly less of a failure than whatever frightens them about jumping. And so they stand there, weighing the options, trying to articulate the fear, giving themselves pep talks or letting words close over their heads like water in which they are drowning. Some of them (30%) never jump.

I think about this film almost every day. That I probably wouldn't have agreed to do it because I am not excited about the idea of someone filming me in a bathing suit, or because I don't especially like swimming pools, the smell of chlorine, or because the part of me that is intimately familiar with falling on sidewalks would be afraid of cracking my head on the side of the board. But if I did agree to do it and got as far as the diving board, I don't think I would have a problem with jumping. It's not that I think I am brave: I'm not. So much of my life has been getting to the other side of something that terrified me – moving to new countries, anything with microphones, dating – and then realizing it was not that scary and after all lots of people do those things. So partly I would do it because I have learned over time that once I've done something it's not a big deal. And partly I would do it because I would want to eliminate the retrospective embarrassment of having dithered in front of others. And – a little – I would do it because I would want to know that I had, to have the memory of it as a time I overcame my smaller, more fearful self. But mostly I would do it because I would be so overwhelmingly curious: how would it feel to fall deliberately like that, would there even be time to feel the rush of air before the plunge into the water? Would the water be cold, or when you fly into it do you not really notice? How would it be to experience those weightless worlds in quick succession? A woman, a bird, a fish, a mermaid, a woman. I would want to know. 

Why would you jump? Why don't you?

The inability to know or even have a really good sense for your importance to others, your value. The feeling that knowing this would be really worthwhile and the sort of tentative examination of that followed by the complete knowledge that such examinations are tedious and dull and prove nothing if not your own total lack of importance and worth to anyone ever. Your desire to escape that knowledge. The plunge into activity, into myriad activities, into hobbies and into the lives of others, the submersion meant to remove or at least alleviate the amount of time spent on tedious self doubt. The moment of gazing, enraptured, at an object or objects of affection, the stretches of time you spend watching someone as if they were a film laid out for your observation. The pure delight of stepping past that watching and into seeing. How it feels to know someone with that intensity. The moment of wondering if anyone sees or has ever seen you with such completeness and such pleasure. The inability to know or even have a really good sense for your importance to others. The days you can spend looping this. The days you could spend doing something else. 

This is an ice floe in the cold cold ocean. A low flat mass of moving ice, the cocktail accessory of the arctic.

To this ice floe, in the course of their journeys, come titans and curiosity seekers. What an iceberg they say. I bet it stretches for miles. They plan a lifetime of destruction and exploration, whichever comes first, or both. But the ice floe goes no deeper; it is what it appears to be. It is a flat glittery surface, and nothing more. This is a perfectly lovely place for a polar bear to float along in search of better land, black nose hidden under white paw. This is a good place to fling aside a monster invented in haste and repented at leisure. This is a cold place, in short, that is nevertheless an inviting enough home for a few weirdos, human flotsam, at least temporarily. But it is no more than that.

The ships say they don't want any drama and then finding none back away and steer towards another iceberg.

The ice floe makes a list of other words that start with FL — flow, flexible, flirt, flake, flimsy, fleeting — and waits for the next anguished creature seeking refuge, the next boatload of self-destruction to flop uselessly against its shallow nature. Initial appearances aside, it never pretended to be anything else, after all. 

How they will always insist on seeing what you do in some different way and then saying that their way is the way you really see it. This is about sex, they say, and you say that it is not, that it is simply nature and that it is free and they nod coyly and say sure sure, sex is natural sex is free. This was not your point. Your point was that a flower bursting into bloom, the colors inducing synesthesia, the purple exploding in your mouth, is beautiful enough as it is. Does not have to be joculared into a sex organ of anything other than what it is. How they will insist, though, and juxtapose the photographs of your actual naked body as if it proves rather than clearly invalidates their point. If you wanted bodies you would have had bodies, would have had soft downy hair beaded with sweat, the salt flavor strong on the tongue in your mind. The implication of metaphor when your gaze and your hands have never been anything more than perfectly direct. And now you are painting the world on the other side of a bone and all they want to talk about is the bone, which they say represents your fear of death. As if you felt such fear; as if any fear could keep you from what you want. As if you were ever interested in the picked-clean curve when the blue sky on the other side was all you wanted, that clear perfect cerulean and the moon nesting in it. Death, to the extent you will indulge the metaphor, is only the frame for the place you are aiming to capture. And yet they insist. You blink at them in lashless boredom, a portrait of zero fucks given, and pick up the brush and get back to the sky.