There are times when you feel closer to them, the what-ifs and might-have-beens that surround you and spread out like the clawed branches of a ghost tree. Some branches may still have leaves spread out in the sun, some drop twinkling clouds of pollen or bear ripe round fruit, others are broken or sawed off, reaching jagged splintered ends. You may sense the envy or empathy, relief or horror, as you realize what it would have been like had you taken that path rather than this, or the course of action where you should have known better, or the sudden unknowable impact that slaps you across the face. Are you actually touching minds with yourself as your double swiftly recedes into their own quantum forking, forever unseen to you afterward? Is there still a slight link while your neural patterns still coincide and the two of you persist in thinking in tandem, until the other possible world overwhelms them and catches them up in its flow?

I sometimes feel closer to the slender ghosts of the forking paths myself, as things were on the night that I was driving north with my partner, close to the end of a long journey. The GPS system that guided us seemed caught on the point of a teeter-totter, now recommending a straight path to our destination, next suggesting that this same route would take an hour longer. Frustrated, we turned aside from the machine’s advice and chose a reasonable-looking side path, turning from the broad easy route of a large interstate highway to the wood-shrouded turns of a quieter route. Long stretches of road stretched ahead, shrouded in the gloaming and punctuated with occasional traffic lights that indicated the sparse and unpopulated crossroads.

We drove for hours without any rest stops as the night closed over us, and finally had to take refuge at a chain drug store. As we pulled back out into traffic and picked up speed to pass through a green lit intersection, I saw it from the corner of my eye. Someone was turning through the intersection from the other lane, making a left turn into oncoming traffic.

I knew we would hit them. I shouted in a panic and hit the brakes, feeling the tires catch and relinquish the pavement as the hydraulics fought to keep us from skidding, and the other car’s passenger door got closer… “No!” I screamed as I lost hope, but even as I shouted we were slowing, and we stopped several feet short as our entangled counterpart sailed on his or her way across our forward bow, crossing the tee. Almost immediately I hit the gas again, and we surged forward once we were clear; fortunately no one had been close on our tail and we were not struck from behind. It was all over and behind us in a few sparse seconds.

As we drove off, I felt the ghosts swirling in my mind, the structures by which our brains foresee and prepare for hypothetical events, all left hanging. Some of them were feeling the crunch and shock as the car’s bumper struck their side and the airbags slammed into our faces, the pulling over in a crippled vehicle, injury or death… However close we had been to disaster, I was separated from those other possible outcomes as firmly as if I was rising from a dream, with the assembled night-logic and fantastic events swiftly becoming unworthy of recall.

Is it only this that separates us from spiritual awakening? Fragments of godhood spread into thin time slices that cannot combine to reach reconciliation, cannot negotiate their way to higher understanding? Does the tale of Babel serve as a distant recollection of an uglier incident where we were sundered from most of our other selves? What would we accomplish with such broad ranging power to explore the consequences of our acts?

I had no further way at the time to express what I saw in this glimpse of otherhood, as I dwindled back down into just one instance of my life, a small sliver of self that continued like a thin silver thread to pick out one possible path to a particular destination. Planned, safe, seemingly destined to occur.

But if I have the presence of mind to remember on some future occasion, I may make the attempt and see what may come of it.

I may try to take hold of that fraction of a second of contact and not let go.