The Path Not Taken

Is this world all there is?

I find myself reflecting on the road I’ve traveled and those I’ve not. We are after all the choices we make, the roads we take, and those we don’t.  I’ve always thought I’d write my memoir and call it “The Memoirs of a Not-yet-Famous Lady”, or better yet, ‘The Memoirs of a Not-yet-Infamous Lady’.  Am I a lady? Sometimes.

I wonder, though, if this is all of it.  Is there something to the road not taken that is somehow a part of me? When the roads diverged, did a me walk on with the other decision into a parallel world?  Who is that she that is me having made other decisions.  Is her life any better or worse?  Would I like that me better?

I’ll never know, but, I wonder where she is now?  That girl, that me, the one who married John and moved on.  Where is the one who had an abortion and sans child, moved on?  Where is the rock collector faery child, who lived in dreamscapes of her own design? 

Each is a piece of me.  I want to follow their trail.  I want to know where they are on their life’s path.

Did so many me’s diverge from this me that I am but a shadow.  Did I perhaps spin off a poet, too, and only kept for me a glimpsed flight of that fancy.

May Sarton said, “…if you dilute yourself too much and try to do too many things, you do none well.”  I digress.

Where is the artist never encouraged?  Is that why I only go so far then let each piece go?  Each a bubble blown from a child’s wand reduced to one little moment of brilliant iridescent color fading then to memory.

What if each was real? What if each was a real me, a me that diverged and in parallel worlds of infinite possibilities walked away.  What if a real me took each path, and my sole job on this plane is to dream – to begin each me and send her on her way.  Each a whole and complete life, and I just the dreamer with no real life of her own – destined at last to run out of dreams and paths and she’s to set upon them and at last empty to cease.

If that is the case, what now?