An exploration of an alternative life.
By Jolie Smith
"We don’t really know it, but we sense it: there is a sister ship to our life which takes a totally different route."
- Tomas Tranströmer
I’m hurdling myself into chaos on the highway, away from Oregon. Interstate 80 glides all the way through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska. It starts in California and ends right outside New York City. In another life, maybe I’d end here. I would travel miles until the very end--until the person I might have been steps out of the car into her apartment. A dog greets her at the door, his name is Milo after a book she loves. (Which, even in this life, I still devoured and raved to my fancy friends.) But the life I’ve followed up to this point will land me in Michigan. My home and birth-state. The place that would’ve formed my early years no matter what decision I have made and will ever make.
In the car, the moon looks soft and slanted. Like it’s about to fall but if it did there would be no noise. There is a crisis all around me. People without masks on and people who are lonely and the sky which is empty because of the way humans fill it with poison. The lights, in this Anthropocenic version of Earth, eat up most of the stars. A friend once said, Remember to look at the stars in Oregon. The sky was darker there, the stars seemingly more numerous. Beautiful stars. I wonder, as I pull myself through time from a faraway-mountain-land to suburbia, if there had been no raging pandemic, no deadly illness, would my five months on a commune have felt like freedom or confinement. I wonder, in which fantastical sister ship that never was, we would’ve left the ocean and the forests in their deep grooves of self. I wonder which choices humans could have made in order for living trees to cost more than dead ones and living whales to be worth more than piles of blubber.
Returning makes me feel terrible. Makes me realize that my life in Oregon may have been whimsical no matter the crisis. A sabbatical from technology and mainstream beauty products and insanity under the name of religious pursuit. In Michigan everything is still and loud. Limbs don’t leave the couch for hours, but the television can’t stop yelling. Groceries land on the doormat like a stork delivering a baby. Inside the box is a recipe. Send it to this school or that school. Make sure it never hears the word sex or demagogue. Nothing ever works and mothers are still heartbroken over leaving and fathers still roll their eyes at the word nonbinary. It makes my head throb, makes me believe something is wrong with me. But the infinite array of decisions and directions, each one tapering into another sidewalk of possibilities, leaves me in this body. Here is where I’ve become. It’s where I have arrived.
Later, the television is yelling again. My brother is home, eyes glued to the addicting puzzle of information while shaking frames spray into rainbow reflections on windows. How did I get here? To this version of myself: 22-year-old, recently graduated from college, during a pandemic and economic crisis and deep pain soaring from a country in turmoil. It is a world often failing to listen or let go of greed. I hate the saying ‘everything happens for a reason’. The problem with my loathing of it, is that I believe it to a degree. Not in the Godly divine sense or the let’s-fuck-it-up-and-live-with-the-consequences mentality or people saying, Get over your pain! The little tiny part of it, in which I might align with, is that things do happen. Our alternative lives are light years away, too far to reach. This is the path, the universe, the route that I’ve found myself in and the only option is to go forward. It’s an acceptance of reality.
I still think about that other life, the sister ship as Tomas Tranströmer calls it in his poem titled The Blue House. I don’t dwell on my phantom life to fuel anger or jealousy within myself. But to give perspective. To think about the ways in which I hope to change, or how I’m grateful for this thread of life of chance and decisions, the hum underneath it all.. Tranströmer was talking about our own tiny alternative lives, not Earth’s sister ship. But I can’t help wondering if we were all on a different route, a path where we begin to look into each other’s eyes, where we put our phones away, where we own up the reality of environmental crisis, how that would change Earth’s plummeting route. Someone once said, “You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” We’ve arrived at this 4.5 billionth circle around the sun. So what sister ships do we long for? As a population, as a community, as our individual selves? How can we make sure the next few billion rotations have a chance at existing?
1-Anthropocene: A distinct geological epoch, in which human activities have made a large environmental impact. A permanent change to our home planet.
2- Sister Ship: All the other possible routes of life, based on our decisions we make. Our selves living in other dimensions because of a different path taken.
Jolie Smith is a writer, sister, friend, tsunami-footage watcher, mind wanderer, and, once in a while, a psychic. She isn’t great at math (other than algebra) but she can make bird calls using her hands and has generally okay balance. Most of all she loves people and their minds and will spend time vehemently invested in anything you show her--including (but not limited to) books, films, homemade comics, and self-produced music videos.