Love Exists in Every Universe

The persistence of possibility

A few weeks ago my best friend and I went to see Everything Everywhere All At Once. It was one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. It’s a lot, but above all, it’s a story about love and overcoming every barrier to get to it: cultural, generational, and sometimes time and space. It begins with a suggestion of the existence of a multiverse, in which every decision we’ve made has resulted in this present moment, and that the options we didn’t choose would have led to different versions of ourselves that are impossible to fathom. I think about this a lot. If there happens to be a multiverse, which choices would have led me to be rich? Successful? Famous? In love? What if every decision I’ve made is the wrong one? What now? How can I get back on track?

Most of the big decisions I've had to make have occurred in the past seven years or so, as I’ve come of age enough to make them consciously. I migrated friend groups in high school, changed my prospective career path three times, took a leap and moved to London (a move which only intensified the density of such choice-making). Eventually, everything seems to have mellowed out, as if I was hopping across a stone path on a wide river: I thought so much about each step at first but I think I’ve found my rhythm. Now I stop to look at the view sometimes, and my feet carry me forward. When I first started driving, my biggest anxiety was feeling out of control in terms of the way others drove on the road. I was being as careful as possible, but I struggled to trust the drivers who could swerve into my lane at any moment. After a while, I stopped thinking about it. Much of the anxiety has been replaced by ease, manifesting itself in the quiet moments, like driving through town to work at 5 am or the afternoon sun flickering onto a tree-lined street. My sisters ask how do you know nobody’s going to crash into you today? and the truth is, I don’t. I accept all the possibilities every time I shift the gear into drive.

by René Magritte

I have lived so many different lives. I have been a student, an angsty teenager, an artist, a sibling, a writer, a daughter, a granddaughter, a friend, an ex-friend. I still contain the remnants of those lives and they exist in me simultaneously. Perhaps that is what the true multiverse is. I am attempting to walk through life so that every day provides a newfound reconciliation with every life I have lived, and a sealing of the cracks of possibility between them. That’s where the love lies. I can always say I’m sorry, or I love you. I can change the course of my day with a phone call or a poem. And, most importantly, I can forgive all the different versions of myself over and over and over again.

bell hooks wrote in “All About Love”:

In an ideal world, we would all learn in childhood to love ourselves. We would grow, being secure in our worth and value, spreading love wherever we went, letting our light shine. If we did not learn self-love in our youth, there is still hope. The light of love is always in us, no matter how cold the flame. It is always present, waiting for the spark to ignite, waiting for the heart to awaken and call us back to the first memory of being the life force inside a dark place waiting to be born — waiting to see the light.

All this being said, there are certain moments where I feel a deep sense of confirmation, where I feel like I am in the right place at the right time, like this path is the one that is blinking a constellation across the endless echo of little tiny universes. For example: all the meaningful conversations I’ve had with my best friend, none of which would have taken place if I had remained in the same friend groups in high school, or chosen not to take AP Literature, or attended a different school altogether. Yet, there are times with her in which I feel so settled that I am convinced we would find each other anyway. There is an unspoken I wish I had met you earlier, but sometimes I mention a childhood friend in conversation, forgetting that she never knew me at seven or nine or twelve because it feels like she still knows that part of me. Maybe there’s another universe in which our paths crossed sooner.

I do think that love is the answer. It is that rooted feeling, the core of forgiveness and acceptance, a familiarity that proves that every path you could have taken would have led you to love — a strength that would transcend every possibility, a constant answer in a world of questions. I’m at a turning point in my life, and the endless maze of the multiverse probably has a hundred different decisions I could make and a hundred new futures to lead to. My parents have always wanted me to go into psychology, and they still do. Maybe I will, someday, but there’s something about writing and language that gives me that inkling of belonging. I know I’m taking the hard route. But I just have a feeling. That’s my only response these days.

Nikki Giovanni wrote in “Mirrors”:

but what can you do… but It Cannot Be A Mistake to have cared… It Cannot Be An Error to have tried .. It Cannot Be Incorrect to have loved.

Further Reading

“The Light That Shines When Things End” on I Wrote This For You, May 2014

“I dwell in Possibility - (466)” by Emily Dickinson

“Endings” by Sandra Lim

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What I Enjoyed This Week

Recent Reads

• The Idiot by Elif Batuman. I first read this in 2018 before my first year at university — fitting, as it follows a daughter of Turkish immigrants as she navigates her first year at Harvard University in 1995 — and, now that I’ve finished university, Batuman has put out the sequel. I gave it a re-read both in preparation and also as a full-circle moment, to reconcile with my 18-year-old self and all of her staggered annotations and underlines. Though now I’m older than the main character, Selin, I found that the real impact of the book for me lies in the way my heart almost aches for her — a feeling rooted in relatability and mutual understanding — rather than it being relatable to me in the active tense. I love it so much more now. It’s a wholeheartedly raw perspective on navigating adulthood, first love, identity, isolation, and all of the little embarrassments in between. It’s deeply funny, with sly and witty humor, and the prose is so wonderfully observational. It’s a perfect representation of that time in your life when everything is new and almost begging to be noticed. This, balanced with the constant overthinking and self-centered thought processes that are so common in adolescence, has made this novel a perfect cocktail of feelings. I can’t wait to read the sequel. I will report back on that next week. :-)

Other Wonderful Things

• I have a new laptop! Finally! It’s such a relief to be able to go cordless for more than an hour and to type on a built-in keyboard. Everything feels so fast now.

• Finally restocked on my Golde matcha — my favorite that I’ve ever tried. They don’t ship to the U.K. so I bought an extra tin to take back with me. I’ve been making iced oat milk matcha with blueberry lavender simple syrup from a local company called Crescent Simples. Very very good combo.

• This song, this song, this song. Playlist

Thank you, in whatever universe you’re reading from.

<3

Tara