my life in parallel universes

The universe where I was born on time: January 2001 rather than October 2000. My childhood would not have been spent almost a quarter of the time in hospitals. I would have been in a different class in school, the year beneath what I was in this universe, so the specifics of my childhood would be different: different friends, different enemies, maybe different teachers. The neighborhood dynamics would have been different growing up too, a year younger than the other kids - they would not know me as well. Maybe I’d seem less strange that way. Maybe my mom would have kept her fellow mom-friends from the neighborhood after I started Kindergarten in that universe. Then again, my older brother was more of why my mom had been outcast than I was.

There’s the parallel universe my parents sometimes bring up, where my older brother was born normal, rather than cognitively impaired. They think he would have been a salesperson, an entrepreneur, maybe a computer geek or an actor - he loves movies, so the possibilities of what he could have done with that had he been neurotypical are plentiful. I would have lived with him until I was twelve rather than him leaving home when I was four the way he had in this universe.

Maybe I would have still been a singleton in another universe, or maybe I’d go to the universe where my mom was able to have both twins - we would have to be born on time to have any chance of survival, but having a twin brother would severely change who that baby girl that I once was grew up to be. Maybe I wouldn’t be transgender. Maybe she would stare at me, unable to recognize herself from this alternate universe, unable to reconcile such a singular weirdo with her healthy, birthday-in-January, born-as-a-package-deal self.

There would be parallel universes without alternate versions of my life at all - ones where my mom married the rabbi she dated before my dad, or never left Michigan for her Master’s degree, one where my dad’s parents never left Montreal, one where he never left Missouri or journalism, or never moved to Boston after law school, many universes where my parents never befriended the couple that had set them up or simply never made it to the blind date where they had met, or where they fell out of touch after…

Millions of universes without my life exist - the more difficult part would be finding my life within parallel universes, considering how many events were required before my birth would even be possible. I imagine the technology to enter parallel universes would include some way to search out your life, out of the billions of lives in existence - maybe sorted alphabetically and chronologically?

Perhaps one would be able to filter what year they want to see, so I could start with the alternate universes involving my birth in 2000 and then move backwards to universes involving my brother as child, and so on, exploring further and further into history until I'm not even exploring my life in a parallel universe anymore but just time travelling! Or maybe the technology would require an anchor, oneself or a relative to tie the universes together so the fabric fails to fall apart. That would make more sense.