what if you're in the wrong timeline?

I've been on a John Scalzi bender lately. If you're not familiar with Scalzi's work, he is a sci-fi writer with a wickedly sharp sense of humor. My first encounter with his words was Starter Villain, which left me laughing so hard at one point that tears streamed down my face as I clutched at my sides. It was that funny.

I plowed my way through The Kaiju Preservation Society and The Collapsing Empire, chuckling at Scalzi's wit and admiring how he masterfully crafts effortless dialogue between characters, when I slammed heart-first into Red Shirts. Like the previous stories, I found myself delightfully amused all the way through the hilarious plot twists until Scalzi hurt my feelings.

To be clear, he didn’t hurt *my* feelings on purpose. Red Shirts wasn’t an emotional hit piece meant to be taken personally, although it certainly felt that way. I was a sobbing mess by the time I got to the very last sentence. And if I’m being honest, I’m not totally done feeling squishy and sentimental over it.

Without giving away too much, I’ll tell you that Red Shirts is a philosophical sci-fi parody that asks some big questions about free will, narrative control, and what it means to be a character in someone else’s story. Imagine Star Trek (the first one with Shatner and his ridiculous everything), but instead of following the main characters on the bridge, you follow the extras in the background. The red shirts, as they’re called in this book.

And these red shirts start to notice something’s off, like how crew members don't die if they're in extremely specific circumstances, or how reality itself seems to warp and bend around the main characters. These quirky idiosyncrasies turn the story into a surprisingly profound meditation on what it means to exist when your story was never really yours to begin with. By the time I got to the end, I wasn’t just rooting for the red shirts, I was steeping in my own what-ifs.

Over the past year or so, I have been feeling stuck, as if I am existing in a liminal space. While talking to a friend recently, I said this is a "figuring-out year". But I'm not entirely sure what I need to figure out. Nothing in my life is particularly terrible. And maybe that's it. Maybe it's the mundaneness of my life that has me feeling especially tender about how dismissed the red shirts' characters felt. They were pushed and pulled by forces out of their control. I get that.

My life is clouded by an unsettling feeling that I live in a groove that will, whether I want it to or not, continue to slog along on a predetermined path. But sometimes, I want to peek over its edge and see what else exists. Because maybe in a different timeline, I am not the barcalounger creating a safe and cozy landing spot for others.

In another timeline, to other people, I am dazzling and interesting, and important beyond what I can do to make their life comfortable. Maybe.

Anyway. In the words of red shirt, Andrew Dahl, “I don't care whether I really exist or don't, whether I'm real or fictional. What I want right now is to be the person who decides my own fate.”

And what a fate that could be. In another timeline.