“When you write something, you focus your full attention on it. It’s almost impossible to write one thing while thinking about another. The act of putting it on paper keeps your thoughts and intentions aligned.”

From a heavy rocks glass, I sip the dregs of a single malt, not drunk but good and goddamn buzzed, the alcohol serving as a nice buffer between my psyche and this rabbit hole I’ve fallen down.

There’s an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa.

The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that all possible realities exist. That everything which has a probability of happening is happening. Everything that might have occurred in our past did occur, only in another universe.

I think of all the nights I lay in bed, wondering what it might be like if things were different, if I hadn’t taken the branch in the road that made me a father and mediocre physics professor instead of a luminary in my field. I suppose it all comes down to wanting what I didn’t have. What I perceived might have been mine through a different set of

my identity isn’t binary. It’s multifaceted.

“When you write something, you focus your full attention on it. It’s almost impossible to write one thing while thinking about another. The act of putting it on paper keeps your thoughts and intentions aligned.”

Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.

I lean back against the trunk of a pine tree, a notebook resting on my knees, my thoughts teeming. What a strange thing to consider imagining a world into being with nothing but words, intention, and desire.