Why Wasn't She Lost Like Me

“Because she was at home in her own skin.”

I said it but I didn’t know if I could truly believe it but as the words left my lips they felt more honest than I could possibly imagine. They felt right. Felt like coming home.

For her part she didn’t say anything, just nodded. The illusion shimmered but didn’t move and I blinked twice, shaking my head and shaking it off as if it was nothing more than a passing moment.

“But if possibilities are endless,” I asked her, “Then that means there are worlds where I’m at ease in my skin. It means that there are places where I was fine being… me… him… So how does? How?”

“The spirit is a gem with many facets,” she told me, “Many faces. There is no conditional, only constants.”

“So there are places where I am a man and am happy.”

She nodded.

“So why not send me there?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

She didn’t need to. I knew the answer, understood it completely. I knew what she wasn’t saying and I knew it in my heart and in my head and no matter how much I hated it and no matter how hard it was to face it I knew it.

It loomed behind me, larger than life. It had been there so long, waiting for me to turn and stare it in the eye and I felt my heart seize, I felt my head go dizzy. I felt myself start to shake.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I insisted, “All sorts of people are unhappy. It doesn’t have to be because they… they don’t feel…”

“No that’s right,” she reassured me, “Not everyone has to feel as you do in order to feel out of place. But we’re not talking about anyone else. We’re talking about you.”

“But what about her? About Emily? About this Emily? The one whose life I’m living right now. What happened to her?”

“She shifted too,” he explained, “Is somewhere else just as you are.”

“But she was happy here,” I insisted.

“Was she?”

She wasn’t. I was just mistaking my unhappiness for her unhappiness but she wasn’t at peace, at ease either. She wanted something different, just not different in the same way I did and…

“So it’s just a shell game, then?” I sneered, “I move to this life and she goes into someone else who in turn goes into mine?”

“A simplistic rendition,” she explains, shrugging, “But not entirely inaccurate. Still the question is, are you ready-“

I shake my head and strengthen my words so she knows there is no question here.

“I don’t want to talk about me anymore.”

She didn’t protest, didn’t push. Instead, smiling lightly, she nodded and leaned back and waited for me to go on.

“I don’t understand the way this works,” I said, “Surely if I have a spirit that runs through a thousand different instances then everyone does.”

She nods, and I get angry at it, heated. It helps. It’s helpful to fight against something so I can keep on ignoring…

“What about them, then?” I snarl, “What about their better life? Why do I deserve it and they don’t? Why do they get to… to just suffer.”

“Who says they’re suffering? Who says they don’t deserve it? Who, most importantly, says this isn’t a chance for them as well?”

“How?” I ask, I demand, my voice cold and even as I stare her in the eye and she stares in mine because she knows what I’m talking about even if I won’t put it into words.

Even if I’ve never put it into words because it would hurt too much, she knows what I’m saying.

So she breaks and she sighs and she leans in now, her eyes betraying the emotions behind them. Sadness, that and deep sympathy.

“My dear,” she says, “Sometimes you just need to trust.”

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