Elsewhere

I want to preface this by telling you no I don’t have any proof that this is true, or real... or however you want to put it. If you don’t believe me, I don't blame you.

Last Sunday, I was woken up around 9 am by my dog, Jelly. It was the first nice Sunday in weeks so we wasted no time. I fed Jelly, poured myself a cup of coffee, threw on some clothes and went out for our morning walk. Me and Jelly had done this exact walk somewhere around 100 times in our lifetime. This was our normal daily routine, ever since Jelly was 6 months old. We get to our street’s corner and I turn to my left to check the traffic light expecting to see a green light since cars are speeding by. Except that there is no green light. It’s blue, a bright clear-as-day Cyan Blue. Huh.. that’s weird right? But, I’m a New Yorker so it’s going to take more than one Blue traffic light to stop me in my tracks. Jelly and I continue on our usual walk and pass two more traffic lights, and weird enough they're all blue. Red Yellow & Blue.

At this point I’m curious, so as Jelly and I are waiting on a corner for the light to change from Blue to Red, I pull out my phone and google:

New York City Blue Traffic Lights

Yet somehow all I find is standardized study guides for passing your driving test and weirder, articles about “The History of the Red, Yellow, Blue Traffic Light.” This is when I start to get weirded out, because everything on the internet is written as if Red, Yellow, Blue is the standard traffic light.

The light turns red and Jelly and I keep walking, we start approaching a big intersection and I’m looking all around, just thinking one of the lights must be green, but I’m walking too fast, I’m not looking at the cars, I’m looking at the lights. The next part happened so quickly yet so slow. I saw the car coming, I jerked Jelly’s leash back to pull her out of the street but it caused me to spill my coffee on Jelly, she got scared and jumped forward and I tripped right into the road, letting go of Jelly’s leash on my way down.

This next part is where it gets hard to explain, but I’m trying to put it down into words. I died, a quick swift death. I hit the pavement and within seconds I was gone, but then I was... elsewhere.

I was suddenly in a place that I can only describe as… bright? It wasn’t white and it wasn’t colorful yet it was bright. I wish I had better words to paint a picture, but I just don’t think they exist. I was elsewhere and in front of me, laid out as far as I could see or perceive was a long fractal pattern. Like lightning frozen in time, stretching out endlessly across a vast expanse, like roots of a tree or a crack in the earth splintering out. The pattern is so familiar, I see it everywhere now. Behind me I could feel the presence of someone, someone larger than me but I wasn’t scared. It’s difficult to explain what the being said because it wasn’t ever spoken in language, it was passed to me from the inside out, the understanding of it was seeped into me.

You are safe, you are well. You will soon be back on earth.

“What is this?” I asked silently.

This is the tree of lives.

The being was not referring to the place, but about the pulsing fractal pattern laid out in front of us.

The tree shows all possibilities of life, every life, every universe, every version and prospect.

As I looked forward at the path in front of me, I saw myself, but not as me. I saw myself as a soldier in war, as an Olympic athlete, as a mother, but I wasn’t just seeing myself, I was remembering myself. I was remembering endless lives I had lived and the longer I looked the more I saw, the more I remembered. I saw it all but I didn't understand. The being showed me to a specific branch in the fractal.

This place here, that’s where you started and for a few days that’s the only place on the Tree that you existed.

I followed the branch up and watched it split into two.

“What happened there?” I thought.

That’s where something changed, so your universe became two and with it, you became two.

“What changed? What causes it to split?” I asked

Someone in your observed universe was at a crossroads. They had a decision to make and something in them wanted both. Something in their truest form, so they were given both and they became two, and with them it all became two. The universes continued on, virtually in parallel but gaining slight differences every hour.

I followed the branches as they unfolded together, in the beginning they curved and dipped in unison but as they went on they strayed from each other, until finally one brand split into two, and then three and meshed into the winding paths of the tree.

Each branch is a path of the universe, the closer together they form on the tree the more similar the universes are to each other but no two universes are exactly the same.

“What about these two, what’s the difference here? They look the same.” I focused on two branches that mimicked each other almost exactly as they grew.

Many things are different here, it split off when someone quit their job to become a writer but since then the differences have multiplied. The names of a movie, a brand's logo or mascot, the spelling of a last name, a quote, the lyrics of a song. Little things shift and fluctuate.

“I don’t understand, why am I here?”

A version of you died. Now you’re here in this elsewhere to take a momentary break until you are placed into one of the many universes you exist.

“How can I be placed into a universe where I already exist?”

You were all one once, and you’ll become one again. When you enter the new universe you and the occupying version will become one.

“Will I remember my old life? And all of this?”

This, you will not remember. Your old life, possibly. You’ll be placed into the version of your universe that is most similar to your previous one. Sometimes memories stick, little things like the color of a traffic light. Sometimes even bigger things, like a foreign president's death, but those occurrences are rare.

“The blue traffic light.” I remembered

Yes. You were here just one earth day ago after passing in your sleep. You were placed in a very similar universe, but your brain latched onto that small memory from your previous life, the color of the traffic light.

“What’s the point of it all? Dying and jumping between universes and splitting and merging again?”

There are endless possibilities to it all and therefore endless possibilities to the point of it all. You are born with the free will to do everything you desire, experience everything you desire. You grow and you learn and you live a thousand lives until you slowly re-absorb into one being with the memories of only one, but wisdom of many.

All of this information was passed to me within seconds. As I gazed out over the tree of lives. I started to notice just how many versions of myself were virtually the same. Working an office job, at the same desk with dozens of slightly different chairs. Then in a blink of an eye, I was standing on my street corner with my still warm coffee, my dog looking up at me with her usual bored look. Everything was exactly the same as it had been moments before I died, and somehow, despite the being's confidence that I would not remember elsewhere, I remember it all clear as day.

Straight in front of me, the cars were still buzzing by and I looked up to see the bright green traffic light. By the time Jelly and I made it back home I had already started to convince myself that it was all a dream, or some kind of mental break. None of it made sense. Jelly could tell I was distraught, she jumped on top of me and started licking my face. That’s when I saw something that shook me to my core. Her name tag, the same one she’s had since the first week I got her, engraved in metal it read:

“Jerry”