editor, design - jacob sanders @jacobsandersar t

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Courtney Bernard

Jacob Sanders

And there’s this: If you could see the choices you did not take take tangible form, slip from you, from your body, minor tributaries, if you could watch them spread out wide into the world. Perceiving these cracks in the ice as bodies, your body, versions of your body and the impetus conducting it, variants shooting out of you at every juncture. At an intersection, say: You turn left, your shade turns right. You produce them constantly, inevitably. Paper or plastic, soup or salad. Some of them converge back into your own maze, you might catch one puttering around your apartment after returning from the movie you decided you weren’t interested in seeing. Would they take physical form? Might have to flatten yourself against the wall when passing in a narrow hallway? Logic fuzzy here, I can’t say for certain how this works.

Every decision would produce, but so would indecision. More commonly, even, your variant would dive forward, tear out of view, curl around unseen avenues. The wide, red bricked avenues of fantasy and possibility. While your body—the alpha body, sitting on its hands—holds static.

(By the way, this would not be for all of us. 7 billion and the things we did not do filling every vacancy: stifling. Entire cities of variants, extrapolating, filling your sight, blurry haze of second guesswork. Nauseous to even consider it. That is not how this would work, I’m sure of it. So do not worry: This is only about you.)

At some point your offshoots would reduce in frequency, I think, after the choices become fewer. I believe that’s how this will work. Follow the natural extinguishing of options. Process of elimination: routines cradled, horizons compressed, friends and intimates spurned or drawn closer, years tallied. Those choices left available being more like detours to the same parking lot. Every so often you’d flourish in some new crisis, but gradually less and less of all that. Eventually you wouldn’t detect much of anything. You could start to feel secure that your path was set out for you. You could get on with life.

I saw one of them. It wasn’t much of anything, less than an encounter. I was at an airport—we were at an airport—and there he was, carving through the terminal, my wayward shadow. Our eyes may have met, if they did it was only a passing glance. Not enough for proper comparison. To diagram how his choices had made him, produce justification for what I have made of me. Less than that, just the glance.

If he saw me, or could see me and what he had diverted from, he did not acknowledge and then he was taken up in the throng, toward his airplane that would take him to his world, mine to mine. Business or coach to his gains and losses and people and places, his private corridor, his secret world that is not mine and that I cannot inhabit.

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Lisk Feng

Paulo Campos

Jacob Sanders