Out There

Dear Jalen,

What’s it like out there? I don’t know if you can actually answer me, or if you’ll still be able to reach back for these words where you are now.

Which is where? I don’t know.

I wish you could tell me.

You know, I do still get whispers; I get glimmers and guesses of where you might be. Like last night, when I woke up from a dream feeling cold. First off, I couldn’t remember the dream; I just woke up feeling like there was a sheen of frost all up and down my arms; all everywhere, really. But then I remembered standing in the snow, it was up to my ankles, and there was more falling, and the sky in the distance was all white and gold stripes.

Whatever it was against that horizon, it looked as if it could have been rows of people; except that if they were, their heads would be two times too big, their shoulders too tall, and the rest of them tapering away into nothing. All topped off with snow and as perfectly still as stone. Did I see where you are now?  How many times have you split? How far away have you gotten?

You know I didn’t want you to go. That sounds dumb, right? Or at least weak. Because I was twenty-three, and so were you. Obviously. And you’re my twin. I mean we had this bond, the kind of closeness where we’re not quite two separate people.  Like the time you stepped on that nail and I felt it like it was going through my foot. That wasn’t some psychological bullshit, I didn’t know when I felt that stabbing in my foot that you’d just stepped on a nail.

I cried as soon as you left. I told you that, right? In one of my other letters. I sat down in my room with my back and against the door and cried. God knows what any of our friends would have thought. Jerry and Maggro probably would have dragged me out back and beat me up, and Hank would have avoided me for a week in case my unmanliness rubbed off on him. Dad understood, of course. But Dad would. That day, he caught me crying and he sat down with me and opened his whiskey bottle, and he started telling me about all the adventures he’d had, all the worlds he’d visited, all the possibilities. Endless. Infinite. Every time you split reality you don’t know what you’re going to find. He reminded me that you and I only exist because he did what he did. He always has to remind us, doesn’t he?

So maybe one day you step into some world that’s so bizarre to you, and so full of wonder that you don’t want to leave. And then you see some creature – some woman, or the equivalent of a woman – and you can’t take your eyes off her, you just have to be with her, no matter what. And as the years pass you start to look and feel and breathe and believe more like her, until you look as much like her as our dad looks human.

That’s how its meant to be for our kind, right?

I thought maybe I’d see these things with you. That I’d walk in the shadow of your footsteps and watch all these worlds open up. It wasn’t like that. Not enough like that. I saw glimpses, I saw images, but I couldn’t put them together into a meaningful narrative. Was that a waterfall of fire? Fruit the size of a house? A house the shape of a goat? Do you see? I relied on your letters. I was watching the air all around me, waiting for the twitch, that little break in reality. Just enough to reach in and grab it. I used to live for those moments.

Dad always asks me: “when are you going to go on your journey?”

I used to say to him, “why does there have to be a journey?”

“Our kind, we can’t rest while keeping still.”

God, Dad has to be so full of pretentious crap. ‘Can’t rest while keeping still’? What sort of bollocks do you call that? I told him so.

He just told me, “Oh, you’ll see. The same world can’t satisfy you forever. Your friend Stacey went off on her big OE last year, right? She felt it. Wanderlust. Maybe she even has a bit of our blood, eh?”

Well, God knows, we’re everywhere. Peppering ourselves all over the universes and looking for love.

This might be our last letter. Listen, things have been going downhill. I got fired last month; and things didn’t work out with Patty. I told you about her, right? Last letter. How I thought she was my golden girl – and hey, she was blond – and we were destined for a fairy tale? Turns out we weren’t. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she’s a good girl, and she didn’t do anything terrible and neither did I, but things fizzled. The way they do. Oh, Dad would be shaking his head in that annoying, knowing way and saying that of course they do, she’s too terrestrial for my exotic longings. Blah, blah, blah. So full of himself.

But anyway. He’s kinda right. I mean, it’s possible to be full of shit and still not be wrong. I think it’s time. Maybe it’s a bad reason to go out walking the multiverse knowing that you’ll probably never get home, just because you’ve had a bit of bad luck recently. I feel like I should be doing this for a reason more profound, something locked up in my bones or something. I keep telling Dad, this isn’t the Wanderlust. I just don’t have enough keeping me here.

So yeah, in a few days I’m going to be heading out, hunting for that little glitch in the air that tells me this part of reality’s fabric can be split. I’m going to look into the split, select a possibility, and let chance slide down that path. Just like you did. It’s going to look almost the same as where I left the first time, more or less so the second time, less and less and less the further I go. And the backwards trail won’t lead home. Which means pretty soon your letters won’t find me – if they still do now – and mine won’t find you – if that hasn’t already come true, if you even still look out for them. I guess what I’m working up to is goodbye. We’ll always be twins, so we’ll always have those few threads still binding our experience. A dream, a flash of déjà vu, a whisper heard from nowhere. I take comfort in some of that shit, I’ll have you know. I really hope you do as well.

I wish you all the best out there, big-brother-by-two-and-a-half minutes. Whoever she is, I hope you find her. I hope I find mine too.

Forever, one way or another,

Your brother and other half,

Keegan.

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work.