It was during his bi-daily plucking of his eyebrows that Jared “Tank” Thompson had a revelation that might have changed the world.
Staring into his dorm room bathroom mirror and struggling to get a tweezer grip on what appeared to be a sequoia of a hair on the bridge of his nose, he pondered the word “unibrow.” He knew from his Freshmen level English class that he was currently on the third semester of taking that “uni” was a prefix that meant “one” and brow were those bushy caterpillar things that bad genetic luck cursed him with.
As he cursed the eyebrow hair’s parentage and leaned closer to the mirror, he pondered other “uni” words… Unicycle: One wheel. Unicorn: One horn. Unitard: One retard.
Uni… verse.
“Got you, you little son of a…”
He yanked his tiny tormentor free from its fleshy abode and crossed his eyes to get a better look at his foe. How small and defeated it appeared now. He dropped it down the sink as a final indignity.
He inspected his work, confident that his unibrow was now a bibrow and moved on to his nightly pimple hunt.
Why universe? He thought to himself. How do we know we’re the only one? There could be a million out there and we would never know it.
A pustule explosion smacked into the mirror with a tiny plink. He wiped it off with his finger and then rinsed it in the sink.
Jared then had a stunning revelation that could have changed his life forever: He thought of the last dream he had… he was in the middle of the ocean, no land or ships in sight, and he was drowning. The last image he had as he woke up was the murky water overtaking his head and the faint light of the sun becoming dimmer and dimmer the deeper he sank.
“Dude!” he said looking into his own reflection. He had just become one of the few people on the planet Earth to understand the concept of multiversal connectivity. The reason Jared had the dream where he was drowning was because, somewhere in the spatial ether, he – or at least a version of him – had actually drowned. How else would he know what it felt like to inhale seawater? To feel the burn as it invaded his lungs. The rattle and heat of it inside his chest as he dipped below the surface one last time before conscious thought simply… stopped?
A tear formed in his eye. He felt kinship to this other him… sympathy. By god, he actually mourned his passing and, in doing so, garnered a greater appreciation for his own existence.
How many hes were there?
He silently gasped at the sheer enormity of his epiphany.
Then there was a knock at the door.
Pizza was here.
His stomach gurgled and blood evacuated his brain. The revelation was forgotten and Jared involuntarily gave up his status as a truly enlightened member of humanity in favor of a Hawaiian carb overload.
The worlds continued to turn.
Jason Gaston 