sliding doors
I just finished Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library this weekend and it has me thinking about choice, opportunities, regrets, free will, and all that good stuff. If you haven’t heard of it, the book focuses on a woman who finds herself in The Midnight Library—a library filled with books that tell the tales of all of her possible lives.
I’m a sucker for those kinds of stories. It’s a Wonderful Life is my favorite holiday movie, maybe even one of my favorite movies altogether (my favorite moment, the one my family and I always giggle about, is when the protagonist George begs Clarence the Angel to find out where his wife is in an alternate timeline in which he doesn’t exist. After refusing to tell George because it’s too awful, Clarence finally cries, “she’s just about to close up at the LIBRARY!” as if being an unmarried librarian is an absolute horror. I can’t help imitating his aghast yelp every time I watch). I also love that Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors, though it’s not really very good. Any of those alternate timeline episodes that TV shows from the late-nineties/early-two-thousands were into doing (like the incredibly fatphobic ones on Friends) hook me. And if you want to talk about the Mandela Effect, I’m on board and engrossed for hours. Really, anything alternate timeline or parallel universe is automatically of interest to me.
There’s just something so delicious about imagining a character or person’s trajectory unspooling in a totally different (or sometimes exactly the same) direction after one small shift of action or different decision. I lap those storylines up. And I inevitably find myself thinking of crossroads big and small from my own life. Who is she, that woman who made a different decision, who followed another path? Is she the same as me, or is she a wholly different person? Whoever she is, I hope that’s she’s happy. I hope that she’s well.
Are you fascinated by this question, too? Any other It’s a Wonderful Life stans in the house? Whether or not you are, I hope that, in this timeline, you enjoy the thought experiment for this week’s prompt!
prompt #32:
Think back to a decision in your life. It could be massive (that’s probably the easiest to identify because they stand out) or tiny. Whichever you choose, take five minutes to envision that alternative self.
How is that person similar to or different from the you you are now? How did that alternate decision go for them? Are they happy with it? Did they take an altogether different path, or did they ultimately end up where you are now? Let your imagination run.
After the five minutes are up, read back over what you wrote and enjoy this journey. If it sparks something for you, develop the piece a bit, see where it takes you. And if you like what you’ve made, send it my way for next week’s newsletter. I’d love to hear about what happened when you walked through that sliding door.
ashley's piece:
There’s that girl, not too different from me.
We cried the same tears.
Sure, they were seeded by different stories,
but they were salt and fear and pain all the same.