Here and There

I am not crazy.

Okay, I know I look like someone dragged me out of a sewer, and I can tell by your face that I smell like it too. But you have to hear me out. You have to--you have to listen to me, because you don't know what's going on, and I need your help. Are you listening? No, no, no, don't--please, I know you think I'm insane and what I'm about to tell you won't make me seem any better but it's true. But please, God, I need help, and I just need someone to fucking listen to me for a minute.

Yes, just--just stay right there. I'll tell you everything. Just right there. Okay, uh...shit. Where do I start...?

When I was a kid, I used to dream a lot. All the time. Even during the day if--if I got distracted by something, it's like my mind would just wander off, but not like a regular daydream, like a real seeing, hearing, smelling fantasy, like for a few minutes I had completely switched over to a totally different world. I would wake up to the dismissal bell and realize I hadn't heard a word the teacher had said. Some teachers started to think I had fallen asleep with my eyes open and that something might be wrong at home, but everything was fine, it was just in my head.

When I would dream at night, it was mostly just like any other kids' dreams, full of crazy colors and talking animals and all other kinds of nonsense, but sometimes...sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes it was like I was just living a totally different life, normal, but different than my life now. But I knew I was still me, just me in a different place. At that age, I never really thought about it. Dreaming was dreaming, and I never knew what might be next.

My mom always said that my Granny could dream the future, and that it ran in our family. I didn't really buy it until it happened to me. And no, it wasn't any kind of grand apocalyptic vision. It was simple, just me and some new friends out playing on the street, and one of them found a firework somewhere and wanted to light it. We were all too young to even think of carrying lighters or matches around, so we had no way to set it off. Wanting to impress my friends, I volunteered to go get one from my house. Needless to say, lighting a firework on a military base in the middle of November had less than pleasant consequences when my parents figured out it was me.

I woke up and remember thinking how odd it was to have such a lifelike dream, or at least one that seemed so plausible. When your nights typically consist of chatty sharks and secret spy missions, the mundane becomes bizarre. The normalcy made me recall the dream long after I had forgotten the weird ones.

So when I was walking down the street with my friends one day and one of them revealed that he had found a firework that he wanted to light, I remembered.

Have you ever had deja vu? What does it feel like to you? I think to everyone it must be different, but to me it was like someone plunged me into the deep end of the pool and I was standing on the bottom, watching as these bodies dove in and slowed down, humans at half speed. Time almost stopped while all the pieces moved into their familiar places.

"Does anyone have a lighter?"

I waited to see if anyone else would say anything, but nobody did, just shook their heads. They looked at me. I wanted them to like me just like any kid would, but I knew better. I lied.

"No. I don't know where my mom puts them."

They gave up after that, and I left as soon as I could think of a good excuse. I never went back to play with them again. I don't know if they ever found a way to set off that firecracker.

Wait, what is he doing? Why is he looking at me like that? I haven't done anything wrong, I shouldn't even be here. I'm not fucking dangerous, I've never hurt anybody, I just need someone to help me. I can't go to sleep, I can't, or--can you take this thing off me please? I talk with my hands, and it's hard for me to think like this. Can you at least loosen it? Come on, please--Fuck, I need to leave, I need to find a way to get home.

What? Oh, right. Yeah. The dreams. I didn't have them often, but when I did, I knew that I needed to remember them and that they could help stop me from making stupid mistakes, but they weren't all that way. Sometimes it was just like a quick snapshot of something totally boring. I would get the feeling as I walked down the hallway or sat in a classroom while the teacher introduced our next assignment. As I got older I started to wonder about where the dreams came from. Have you heard of parallel universes?

No, no, no, don't look at me like that, I didn't come up with the damn theory! Blame the fucking scientists if it sounds nuts, just listen to me!

I started looking into the theories about parallel universes, and I began to think that maybe the normal dreams I had weren't dreams so much as real things I had done somewhere else, some...time else. Because if they happened there before they happened in my time, it meant things weren't always perfectly lined up, right? It might not be true that I'm dreaming the future, so much as just catching a glimpse of another timeline that isn't perfectly aligned with ours. I don't know about physics or whatever and I didn't read as much as I wish I did but I think that can happen. It must happen. It did happen.

So yeah, I uh...I started thinking that if these dreams were really just me in other worlds or realities or whatever, then maybe I could use them to see more, you know? Like, not just glimpses of useless shit, but important stuff. Maybe see things that would help me make better decisions or something. It was all accidental before then, but I thought that maybe I could do it on purpose, force my mind to switch over, because I was already connected somehow, right? It was there, when I was asleep. I just had to figure out how to use it.

But nothing I did worked. I tried meditating--you know, those Buddhist monks can do some crazy shit--but it was almost like I was dreaming less, not more, and the dreams weren't the right ones. Every day I woke up and got more frustrated. I kept a dream journal so I could remember them better, but it didn't do any good. My boyfriend kept asking me what was wrong and didn't understand why I was upset. I never told him about the dreams because I knew he'd be like you. He'd give me the same look you're giving me now.

No one knows how to fucking do this, you know, so it didn't matter how much I researched or what I googled, I could never find anything that would tell me what to do. One night when my boyfriend was at work, I sat down at my computer and tried to comb through all this technical jargon about parallel universes and theories of physics, try to make sense of it, but I'd been drinking and...hell, I doubt I could understand that shit sober, let alone drunk. I don't even remember putting my head down, but when I woke up, I was still sitting at my desk. I got up and went to the bathroom, and it wasn't until I had my pants down that I realized I hadn't been wearing pants the night before, I'd been wearing shorts. And they were blue, not red.

Yeah, yeah, okay, I was drunk. And people do shit they don't remember when they're drunk, I know that. But I didn't remember ever owning a pair of pants like this, and even if I had, why would I have gone into my bedroom, changed clothes, and then come back out to the desk to fall asleep? The bed was like three steps away. Drunks like easy, so the closer, the better.

When I stood up, I looked at myself in the mirror. Everything looked pretty much the same, but when I turned around to look at my back, the stupid tramp stamp I got when I was eighteen and shitfaced was gone. I started checking for my other tattoos--I had four--and they were gone too. All of them. I still had my belly button piercing, but it wasn't the same one I remembered. Then I started looking at my apartment, and realized that a lot of things were wrong--well not wrong, but different. I still had shampoo and conditioner in my shower, but they were a different brand. The coffee pot and the plates were shaped differently than the ones I remembered buying. I had the same laptop, but the books stacked on my desk were law books. I hadn't thought about law school for years, not since I had to drop out when I lost my scholarships because of 'poor academic performance.' And I know this is fucked up, but only after I noticed all the little changes in my apartment and my clothes, did I realize that my boyfriend was gone. And not, like, gone for work gone, I mean gone. I looked in the bedroom, the bathroom, anywhere that he might have left a razor or a t-shirt or something, and nothing. So I called his number, but even as it rang, I wondered if he'd be the person that was going to pick up or if it would be someone else.

A woman's voice answered. I had to force myself not to be angry because it wasn't his sister or his mom; I knew both of them. This was some other woman answering my boyfriend's phone.

"Hi, I'm looking for Mike. Who am I speaking with?"

"This is Stephanie, his wife." The word 'wife' sounded like a gunshot to me, but somehow I still hoped that maybe it was some kind of ruse. I knew if I asked too many questions she'd get suspicious though, so I tried to sound normal.

"This is Jamie, I'm a friend of Mike's. Is he around?"

He was busy, she said. He'd call me back. It's weird how you can feel relieved and completely full of dread at the same time. If he did call back, I wasn't sure I really wanted to pick up. I suspected he probably would have no memory of me, or at best, that we had dated and been done a while ago.

I remember glancing at the clock and realizing it was 9:30. It was Friday, so I knew there must be something I had to do, whether it was school or a job or something else. But I didn't know what to do. I started checking my wallet, my phone, trying to put the pieces together to figure out what I should do next. By that time I had begun to accept the fact that--somehow--I had finally done what I'd been trying to do for months. I had no idea how or why it worked, but I was here. And if I wanted to get a bigger glimpse of what my life was like in this place, I needed to try to live the life as my other self would.

Other Me apparently likes google calendar too, because when I checked that, she had her day all laid out. Fortunately, she--I--wasn't supposed to start class until 10:30, so I had a little bit of time. I knew by the emails left open on the computer which school she was going to, so now the only thing left was to figure out where her class was and make it on time. It didn't take long, and I managed to walk into the auditorium for class right before it started.

They were passing papers back, and when they called out my name, I wondered what grade I would see on the front sheet--I nearly shit myself when I saw that it was an A, and underneath it was some comment on brilliance that I never would have seen on any of my papers. Just as I started to wonder whether coming to this class was a good idea after all, the professor called on me to answer a question. I could see on his face that he had total confidence that I would have the answer, but I didn't even understand half of the words in the question. I just stood up and left without saying a word.

On my way out, I started to feel kind of...odd. Not like sick, but more like that dvu feeling again, things slowing down. Only this time, they did stop. Just for a second, but they stopped, and I thought I was going to die. I couldn't move, couldn't breathe, and you know how you can hear your own heart beat when it's quiet enough? I couldn't even hear that. It felt like I was being crushed.

And then, all of a sudden, I was fine. I was standing in the quad, just like I had been a minute ago, but things were different. The buildings were all the same, but the flowers planted in the beds were a different color. Classes which should have been in session were letting out.

Sleepwalking, right? That's what you're thinking. The whole thing was a dream and I somehow managed to sleep-dress, sleep-walk, sleep-drive, whatever, to a college campus I haven't been to in years, to wind up standing in the quad. But you're wrong. You know how I know? Because I still had the fucking paper.

Fuck, I don't know--probably still back on my desk at home, but it's not here. No, I can't get it, you idiot, because it isn't here, don't you get it? This isn't where I'm supposed to be, this is somewhere else, and I need to get back, that's why I need your help.
Sleep? No. No, I can't sleep. I don't know, maybe two or three days ago? It doesn't matter, I can't sleep until I get back. If I go to sleep again...

Look, you have to let me finish, and then you'll understand, okay? Just let me tell you the rest and then you'll know what's going on and you can help me get out of here.

When I got back, everything was normal. My desk just had the normal bills and shit on it, Mike's stuff was all over the place, my shampoo and conditioner was the right kind. I called into work sick because I just felt...off. Like the things around me weren't real. I knew that I was in the right place, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that something had changed while I was gone, and I couldn't figure out what. I don't know how long I spent in the bathroom staring at my reflection, at my tattoos, telling myself I was real, this was real, but so was the other place. When Mike got home, I had him out of his clothes so fast he asked me afterward if I had been reading Fifty Shades of Gray or something. I wasn't even mad when he left his shoes in the middle of the floor, I was just happy to see them there.

As tired as I was that night, I couldn't fall asleep. I lay there next to Mike, thinking about my other self, my other life, and wondering. I had only been there a couple of hours, but I had already begun to appreciate the profound differences between us. She stayed in school--by the look of it, she worked hard and partied a lot less than I did--and made it into law school, where I could have been--had wanted to be--had I made different choices. She had no boyfriend, but her apartment was nice, well-kept, and based on the smiles from classmates and the comments from the professor, she was well-liked. I compared this reality to my own and my feelings started to morph from joy and success to anger and jealousy. Why didn't I do better in school when I knew I could? Here I was, stuck working some menial retail job, always making an excuse why I can't go back to school yet, when Other Me is nearly done building an actual future for herself. So what if she doesn't have a boyfriend? And who knows, maybe she does, but he just doesn't live with her. I hadn't even thought about that while I was there. I found myself wondering what it would be like to live on my own again, and not have to clean up after someone other than myself. I wondered what it would be like to live her life.

Don't give me that face. That false sympathetic bullshit you give the people who wind up here. I'm not broken. Everyone has wondered what it would be like to live a different life, even you. The only difference between you and me is that I've seen what it would be like to live a different life. I've seen more.

I couldn't go back to work after that, knowing what I did about who I could have been. I told Mike that they'd let me go, but I just never went back. Instead I tried to go back to the other place. I spent even more time doing the things I had done before--meditating, dream journaling, all that shit. I fell asleep at my desk almost every night. Mike was worried, but I didn't care. When he would come into the living room to try to get me to come to bed, I would pretend not to wake up. At first he tried to pick me up to carry me into bed, but I pushed him off and he didn't try again. I started drinking more, wondering if maybe the reason it worked that night was because I had been drunk. Maybe it did something to my brain chemistry, who the hell knows. One night, I drank too much and knew that I needed to vomit. I made it to the bathroom just in time to throw up and then passed out on the floor.

I woke up hungover and pissed off. Even if I had pushed him off when I was sleeping at the desk, the least Mike could have done was check up on me if he knew I was passed out on the bathroom floor.

It wasn't until I walked out and saw the condition my apartment was in that I realized something was wrong. It didn't even look like the same place I lived in--as I looked closer, I realized the windows were in different places, and were covered up by blackout curtains. I went to one of them and looked out. I was in a totally different building, and I didn't recognize anything.

When I heard someone else start moving around behind one of the doors, I ducked back into the bathroom. I shut the door behind me and locked it, and when I turned around and faced the mirror, I almost choked. My stomach somersaulted and I leaned over the sink as I fought the urge to vomit.

My hair was an obnoxious red I'd tried once and sworn off years ago. Black eyeliner smudged into deep shadows and streaks down my cheeks. I was wearing underwear and a disgusting black tank top that was stained with something vile, and nothing else. Under the fluorescent light my skin looked sickly, and the tattoos and piercings stuck out against the paleness like 3D pictures, but awful. I looked more closely at my arms, and suspicious-looking scars shone against the light, slim lines at the wrists and dots at the crooks. The fresher looking dots were ringed by purple and yellow.

Someone pounded on the door behind me and I jumped. I knocked a bottle of pills off the counter and the cap burst off as it hit the floor, pills flying everywhere.

"What the hell are you doing in there?" It was a man's voice, but I didn't recognize it. It was deep, groggy and annoyed.

"Nothing," I said, and I started trying to pick up the pills. My hands were shaking so bad I could barely manage to fit them between my fingertips.

"Are you taking a shit? Fuck it, I'll just piss in the sink, and I don't want to hear about it later."

I heard footsteps move away from the door, and I relaxed a little bit, but I didn't know what to do. I couldn't stay in this bathroom all day. The last time only took a few hours and then I was back to normal, so I thought if I could just get out of the apartment, go somewhere else, eventually things would switch back. So I waited until the footsteps stopped and I heard the door close again outside, and then I snuck out of the bathroom and into the living room. Clothes were flung around everywhere, so I grabbed a pair of pants that I figured must be mine and changed into a rumpled t-shirt that smelled dirty but at least didn't look like it had jizz stains on it. Then I left.

I didn't take anything with me--wallet, keys, cell phone--I didn't think I'd need it. I just walked out onto the street and followed it until I had to turn, and then kept doing that, just waiting for that crushing feeling to come back. After a few hours, my feet were killing me and nothing had changed. I had made my way to the neighboring part of town, and things were beginning to look familiar. I realized I was only a few blocks away from my apartment, and I headed that direction hoping maybe it would trigger the switch. When I got to the street my building was on, all I found was a big open park full of dogs and joggers and kids. I couldn't stop staring.

As people passed, I noticed them scooting as far away from me as the sidewalk would allow, and it struck me how weird it must look, some junkie standing on the corner staring at a park full of kids. I turned around and started walking again, but I had no idea where to go or what to do. I couldn't remember where I had come from, and even if I could, I didn't know if it had been my place or the guy whose voice I'd heard. I was exhausted and my head was killing me, and finally I sat down on a bus bench a few blocks away from my should-be apartment. I sat there trying to figure out what to do next and wondering how I would manage it, and then it was like I got struck by lightning. I had fallen asleep and woken up here, right? So it stands to reason that I could go to sleep here, and wake up there. I don't know why I hadn't thought of it before, but the thought filled me with so much hope and energy that I almost couldn't fall asleep. It took forever. I was worried that the longer I sat there, the more chance a cop would happen by and tell me to move along, but no one bothered me. Eventually, I dozed off.

God, if I had just known...but how could I? Shit, how could anybody?

I woke up, and as soon as I opened my eyes I knew it was wrong. The bus--what should have been a bus--was something else altogether. I don't even know how to describe it. It sat in front of me, and the driver--was he a driver? Pilot? Operator? Fuck, I don't know--waved at me like he wanted to know if I was getting on, and I shook my head. And then it just flew--I shit you not, flew--down the road, and it was gone.

Why are you looking at me like that? People have been talking about flying cars for decades, don't you think that at some point it's going to happen? I didn't say that fucking little green men were driving it, for Christ's sake! Just forget I said that, what you should be paying attention to is the fact that it didn't work. I was somewhere else ELSE and I knew even less about who I was than I did before. I tried not to panic but if you woke up at a bus stop in a strange universe, wouldn't you freak out too? No? Then I guess you must be goddamn Chuck Norris.

Once I pulled myself together, I checked my driver's license--this me at least had her wallet, cell phone, and keys when she left the house--and saw that even though I didn't live in my should-be apartment, I still lived close by. I needed a quiet place to figure out what to do, so I left the bus stop and walked back to this apartment, hoping that I wouldn't meet a curious boyfriend or roommate. In that, at least, I was lucky. There were signs around the apartment that someone else lived there or at least stayed over regularly, but thankfully they weren't there. I sat at the table and went over everything that had happened, everything that I'd done before skipping the first time. Ha, skipping. Like I can just skip along wherever I want. Whatever, I don't know what else to fucking call it.

But I think I might know how it works, or at least part of it. So the first time, right? I fell asleep at my desk. It wasn't on purpose, I was drunk and just fell asleep. Well, I think the other me--law student me--did the same thing. And remember how I said the times were a little bit different? When I left the classroom in the other place, everything was in session, but when the switch happened, it was like things rewound by like ten minutes. So even though the times might have been off a little bit, we were still able to be in the same place and be close enough to switch with one another. And then it happened again when I passed out in the bathroom. I don't know why I was able to be in a completely different place, but I mean I was still within walking distance of my apartment, so maybe the layout of things was off but we were still able to line up enough to switch. And I don't know why the first time only lasted a couple of hours but the second time lasted longer. But when I fell asleep at the bus stop, I switched with a whole other version of me that might have just been on the way to work or something. And when that happened, I think I took another step further away from home, like a gap was created the first time, and the second time widened it. I just felt more wrong, like I was out of sync with everything. It was like the feeling I got after the first time, but stronger.

The first time I switched back, I just had to wait and maybe wind up in or around the same spot as the other version of me around the same time, and we were able to change back. Law student me would naturally go to class like she would on any other Friday, even if she couldn't explain how she'd woken up to a different apartment and a live-in boyfriend. So I just had to figure out where the second version of me would go and try to be there around the same time. But as soon as I thought about it, I realized I had no idea where she would go. I had at least done this semi-on purpose, but she probably just woke up in a strange apartment, with a strange man, and no idea how she'd gotten there. That might have been a typical night for her, given what I'd seen of her recreational activities...who the hell knows. So, all I could do was hope. Hope, and not sleep. Do you know what that multiverse theory shit says? There's a universe for everything you do. Everything. And now I've opened this door in my head and I can't close it, and anything I do, anywhere I go, there's another universe for that choice. I'm playing universal hopscotch with a fucking blindfold on!

But I think I'm close. Maybe another couple of days, another couple of skips...I don't think I've gone too far, I think I can still make my way back. And when I get back, I'll figure out how to stop it, how to shut this damn door, and I won't ever open it again, never again--

What are you doing? What is that? No. No. NO! You can't, please, please don't, if you knock me out I can't go back, I can't go back, I can't go--