I was standing in the belfry of the Church looking down at the last-minute preparations and the people seemingly having a great time. A big day for me. 20 years… 20 years ago I came to this town and loved the place immediately. The woods of Northern Pennsylvania, the hills, the clean air, the calm gentleness of the place… and the people.... the most wonderful people you can imagine. Friendly, eager to help, working hard and valuing the creature comforts their work affords. People minding their own business, yet able to come together on occasions of joy or sorrow. People always keeping their smiles up and working hard to make their inner state match the facade. Soft on the outside, strong on the inside. It seems like a set of some romantic movie. It seems like a set of well-connected gears – everyone in the right place, everyone knows someone or at least someone's cousin through primary school or kids' sports or a dog park. It seems a single outsider can bring the whole place to a screeching halt. But I've managed to fit in despite being more than an outsider. I have come here from another World.
I think I was born in this World but in another country. I said "I think" because there is no way to be sure as it could be a similar World or maybe not. Surely one could just hop on a plane, fly to the old place and find out, but in all honesty – why bother? Would I run into a old version of myself? What if the Original Me had moved elsewhere? In that case me not meeting the Original Me will prove nothing. I've poked around a bit looking for traces of The Incident that started it all for me but found none in the old archives and newspapers. This seems to be opening a whole new can of worms – not only this could be a Similar World but also The Incident could have "replicated" me and others pulled into it or some Forces erased our existence from history or anything else. At this point I realized that the only can of worms I want to deal with is the one I buy at the lake where I sometimes go with a fishing rod to sit and contemplate.
I was expected to excel in school as a child and I did. Learning was easy and I did a lot of extra reading. As a result I often "knew" the way thing must go as they did in the novels but surprisingly they didn't do so in reality. You can read the entire bookcase of literature – from French History to legends of ancient Greece to Birdwatching Guides and still not know what to do when a class hyperactive jerk kicks you in a butt and runs away while his buddies burst out laughing. It only gets worse from there. The teachers make sure to notice nothing and the parents being a bit too bookish themselves lashed out at me when I got a "notice of bad behavior" after attempting to stand up for myself against the whole gang. NERD!!!! Yeah, that's me…