The best part about parallel universes is that I feel finally me, an individual, unattached to nor defined by a culture, place or set of people. I am me, and I can remain so across time zones, languages and time. I no longer shift through identities, or feel difficulty combining a Chinese speaking me haggling on the streets of Beijing with a French speaking me asking my waiter for another glass of Riesling, with yet another English speaking me sipping iced coffee as I hail a yellow taxi.
I remember when I first began to travel, I would hit pause on the timeline of my life, so that I could make a clear difference between my real life, versus a temporary reality that I considered not real. I defined my life belonging to a certain place. And if I left, I would need to start a new chapter in my book, prefacing it before anything else, with the name of that new location.
But in 2016, after moving to Paris, constantly traveling to home in New York, "home" in England, and now about to visit my old “home home” in China, I feel for the first time ever, that my life is not bound to a place, that it could continue anywhere, without me having to return somewhere first.
It’s like living in a parallel universe. At any moment in time, I’m free to leave the city, my apartment, the people around me, and to enter another life and society, in which I keep on living. The only difference, of course, is that I always pick up where I left, unable to continue my journey while I am physically away.
And so it sometimes feels weird when I come back, like I had traveled to the future without having experienced the journey. Especially when buildings appear out of nowhere and entire roads disappear. But somehow, I always find my way back with the help of old friends, who aid my memory in bridging the gap between the past and the present. Then it’s like I had never really left, though maybe just there now with a new perspective.
The best part about parallel universes is that I feel finally me, an individual, unattached to nor defined by a culture, place or set of people. I am me, and I can remain so across time zones, languages and time. I no longer shift through identities, or feel difficulty combining a Chinese speaking me haggling on the streets of Beijing with a French speaking me asking my waiter for another glass of Riesling, with yet another English speaking me sipping iced coffee as I hail a yellow taxi.
I can finally understand, and even identify with, when people around me behave drastically different, perhaps even weirdly, unacceptably different from those in another, my other, culture. I can comprehend, tolerate, even love all of them, without feeling that I’ve compromised one set of my values for another, or that I am being phony with them in front of me.
I'm happy that I can just be a part of me, without feeling that the other doesn’t exist, even if these two me’s are completely different, and perhaps even contradictory. I can mold and adapt into the surrounding I choose, because I know that in that moment, this part of me is real and alive, and I am being myself, though it may no longer be apparent just tomorrow.
I'm forced more than ever to live in the present. I know because each time I leave a universe, I always unwillingly, sometimes unknowingly, lose something. It's happened more than once that upon my return, the café I loved no longer exists, a person I knew had changed more than I imagined, or even I, was no longer the same person I used to be. I cherish the present more than ever because I know that it is with great luck that the people I meet and the situations I find myself in, just so happened to be present in the same universe at the same time as me.
I’ve always dreamed of having homes in different cities across the world. But I guess I don’t really need them after all – because those places I go, I feel already at home.