I awoke the other day from a strange dream. I had been me, in the dream. I had been rapidly approaching my thirtieth birthday. But I had been working too hard, and too fast, and playing the game as she is meant to be played. And I was working in Shetland, in the same miasma of hopelessness that had covered me for so long. Nothing had changed. I was just there, drudging away.

It felt a little like a flashback, a memory of something occurred embedded deep in the brain. Except it was something that hadn’t occurred. It was a different me, a me who had travelled down another fork in the trouser legs of time. It was, to put it quite bluntly, a flashside.

I’m wondering whether there are any other Oscars out there in the multiverse, or just the two. A lot of the “points” points, where a change could happen, seem to end in certain death, which means a lot of single legged bifurcations in my timeline. Which means, by default, that not a lot of Oscars have got as far as thirty. In fact, looking at it as a probability curve, I’m doing fantastically! When one considers how many Oscars have died, it’s pretty miraculous that I’m alive in a trouser leg of time where I’m… well, alive…

Life is often a series of decisions. The trousers of time theory, as posited by Terry Pratchett, is my favourite, although it’s only accurate for a given value of accurate. It’s one of those little “lies told to children” images. Like everything learned in chemistry at high school. Over simplified, and thus completely inaccurate.

Very rarely does a decision have two outcomes. If there is a pair of trousers of time, then they would be designed for a spider, or a cuttlefish. In some cases, for a millipede. Decisions have a lot of outcomes. Very rarely are we faced with a true dilemma or Hobson’s choice. (For those pedants out there who are even now sharpening their pens to stab me through the heart, I know that they are different things. But both are examples of decisions where there are two possible outcomes. For those less pedantic, but in search of further knowledge, put briefly, a dilemma is a choice between two equally bad outcomes, whereas Hobson’s choice is the freedom to take it or leave it.)

Thus, these spidertrails spread out across the multiverse, generally meaning that there are a lot of possible individual yous out there. Each of whom had diverged from you at some point and not been taken by natural attrition. I once had flashsides from a me who diverged at about the age of seventeen. I’ve heard very little from him over the last five years though, and I did reckon back then that he was headed to an early grave. Which might just leave just two of me right now. Across the whole of the multiverse…

It’s a sobering thought. Admittedly, there are other slight differences – small choices like “Shall I get up and write a blog this morning. Nah, I can’t be bothered.” But those timelines are overall so similar to the base (Alright, I know it’s arrogant to think of myself as the one true Oscar, but really, they’re just poor imitations) timeline, that I reckon they merge back in seamlessly with it. That’s why I can never remember which pocket my keys are in. In half a million timelines, they are in half a million pockets, and I’m getting flashsides to all of them at once. But once I get back inside the house, everything goes back to normal, as the timelines knit themselves back together.

So small differences reknit back into the baseline, whereas the larger, life-changing decisions run off along an entirely new track, a branchline of Oscar, you could say, in potentia. Which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why flashsides are such a rare thing. There’s not a lot of other Oscars out there because they refuse to their lines, or reach termination at their final stop. And perhaps it’s not so surprising that I am alive here in this timeline, particularly when I think of all those timelines in which I am not. In those timelines, I’m not alive to know anything.

It was nice to hear from him. He was a braver Oscar than myself, in my opinion. He stayed, while I split. But if he had a flashside to me, he’d have realised one thing. I am happier than he is. More muddled, more complicated, less secure. But by God, I’m happier.