I stood outside in the backyard last evening and felt the tacky, cooling August air stick to my skin. If I had closed my eyes, you could have told me it was a warm afternoon in April. The air felt the same: damp and confused.
If my town of Redding is known for one thing, it is our summertime: an oppressive, unforgiving heat that blasts relentlessly into our valley from May to October, as if the rays of the Sun flow like streams down the mountainsides to pool at our feet, rising with the summer, until we drown in its flood.
…but it’s a dry heat, so they say.
Despite its terrible weather – dark, wet, gloomy winters and long sweltering summers – I’ve always enjoyed that Redding doesn’t have mosquitos. …that is, with the exception of one month, otherwise so sublimely perfect, when patchy white clouds contrast against a deep sapphire sky, when the air is still cool, but the sun kisses your face as if having missed your company for so long, when the grass is as green as the fresh new leaves on the trees, and the wildflowers sway, synchronized in a gentle breeze: April.
So when a cooling evening in August catches my skin as April, I close my eyes and think: how lovely is the Springtime, and then, well, I can’t enjoy this too long, the mosquitos will be out.
…ah yes, that sensation of mosquitos! So specific in my mind to the certain days of April, it brings with it baggage, associations, the package deal of sensations past! I can see it now: standing outside on the back patio of my old house, my [ex]-wife watching TV in the living room, our rambunctious tricolor Aussie spazzing about the yard, our cat perched on its tower at the window behind me, gazing out, overlooking the creek and the savannah behind it. That refreshingly tacky April air… and its mosquitos, sure to arrive any minute.
(Now, in reality, I’m living with my friend in his house. I’m soon to be divorced, if not already. With my family in our home, with my friend in his house, my skin feels the air all the same.)
Though an August evening, I close my eyes and feel an April afternoon, and when I open them, I half expect to be there, transplanted back in time and through space to a familiar setting: I’m with my family again, nothing happened. I woke up. It was all just a dream. It’s April, doesn’t it feel lovely? Except for the mosquitos. Come play with our dog, have a beer, let’s turn on the TV and settle in, as we always do.
But that’s not my life anymore. I’m on a divergent timeline, the one where I get divorced. Somewhere out there, that timeline, that fictional one, it still marches on, but it’s not mine. It’s theoretical, unattainable, existing only in my imagination, and maybe the dog’s. Maybe hers.
Moments like these: sensations that pull me away and lift me to another time and place, they make me feel like this isn’t real. This is just a vacation from my life, from my family. At some point I’m going to turn to my friend in his house and say, “Well, it’s been swell, but I have to get going. I’ll see you later!” and I’ll drive off back to my house and walk through the door and greet my dog and greet my wife and look for the cat.
But that house is sold. I live here now, in the Divergence.
I’m fairly well-adjusted these days. The pain of divorce is largely behind me. I’m looking forward to moving on and living a new life. But when will I stop feeling like this life is a vacation from the other one? When will this be my real life? How long does that take?
My notional family exists on a timeline separate from this one, but running parallel to it. Two of me wake up and go to work in the morning: the me of what is and the me of what is not. Someday, I hope to meet someone and start a new family, but I’m afraid that, as I go forward, I’ll have two families: the one that is happening, and the one that stopped happening, and they will run side by side in my brain, tearing at my confidence in reality, while sharing nothing between them but the sensation that there might be mosquitos.
Doctor Quack 