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The past is a strange place, filled with wistful ghosts of what was and what might have been.

I was in Fair Oaks Park this afternoon, revisiting the land where one chapter of my life opened last summer as I pondered whether it was time to close the door on that chapter. I wanted to linger but all options were locked -- the garden, the library -- so I got in my car and headed slowly homeward.

In El Dorado Hills I turned off the freeway to stop at Village Green Park. I thought back to the strangely distant times I'd had there with people who feel strangely unreal now. I thought of the meetup in that park, of all of us sitting at the picnic tables playing games. I thought of the morning my friend and I came there, and of the bittersweet feelings that morning had provoked: a pinch of regret at lost opportunity, a dash of desire to freeze the moment in time before it could slip away, a mountain of dread of looming decisions, and a profound sense that I had stepped into a surreal alternate reality. These feelings washed over me anew as dim echoes of themselves.

That was all past, this was present. I stepped into the library, which was new to me. I set about looking for one of the books I'd started at previous libraries (never finishing for fear of having to talk to a librarian to get a library card), but none of them were about so I picked out something new. It was Philip K. Dick's Now Wait For Last Year, a story about a future where people recreate the past and the past and present become increasingly inextricable. After a few pages I grew restless, replaced the book on the shelf and after a brief forray to a hilltop returned to my car to continue my homeward journey.

There's something about the sight of Pine Hill in the distance which sends me careening backward in time. As Pine Hill grew, so grew the flood of memories of the old normality. As I turned onto Cambridge, my old apartment complex stretched out before me. I felt a force grabbing me, urging me to go back there and resume that life. I remembered a hundred walks along these streets, a thousand days under these trees. I thought of my old apartment and thought that surely if I tried the door it would open, the kitchen would be on my left and my computer would be against the far wall by the sliding glass door, I would sit down and the old routine would live again as the past six months slid away like a strange dream.

There was that sense of familiarity, that temptation to slip back into the past, and yet at the same time an overpowering alienation. It was as if I were looking at someone else's memories -- strong memories, enticing memories, but I felt I had no right to them. Six months is nothing in a lifetime, and years will often pass without my noticing any difference in my world... and yet sometimes, as now, a hundred and eighty sunrises become a yawning chasm where nothing on the other side is real anymore.

I missed the turn, and shook myself back into reality. I took the next left, and there greeting me was the Oak View complex which I'd taken a tour of in the spring. Nothing had changed, not even the "for rent" sign out front. Could I really have meant to live there, could I really have meant to be roommates with my friend there? Could all the plans which swirled around this place have been mine, when they feel so distant and alien to me today?

What might have been?

A familiar figure waved at me from the side of the road, and in a moment I realized I was looking at myself. I pulled over and the other me approached.

"Welcome back," he greeted me as I got out of my car. "Our paths diverged from a common source, and now we meet again."

I looked him over. Superficially he was much like me, but he had a presence which made him different.

"I'm the coward," I confessed to him. "I took the path of least resistance. I backed down in the face of change."

"And yet," he observed, "backing down from change has changed you. You're not the person we were."

I nodded. "There's no holding still, no going back. To live is to change."

We walked in silence for a minute along the narrow shoulder of La Canada Drive. As the shoulder widened to a sidewalk I turned and asked the question I could no longer resist putting to him: "What happened down the path you took?"

He paused, sighed a little and collected his thoughts before responding. "It was a challenge," he began, "but it wasn't the life-changing choice we'd imagined, or at least no more so than other choices. It was surreal for a few weeks, then it became routine, now it's the new normal and feels as natural and boring as life ever did. I'm still just me, even if I'm not you and we're not the person we were."

We reached the end of the street and slipped into the maze, a wasteland of twisting paths through discarded remnants of our civilization. As we passed the ancient cars and piles of bricks and rusted bed frame, I told him of my own path through the past six months. I told him of the failures and the accomplishments. I told him of the months in Carmichael, related wistfully my last trip to Napa, confessed I felt I was back to square one socially with no real meatspace friends I could count on. I told him of the move to Diamond Springs and the new maze I'd found there, of exploring Placerville, of adjusting to my third home in as many months.

"I'm still here in this same town I've lived in for eight years," my counterpart observed. "Still wandering this same maze, aimlessly. I've got a great friend and that helps, but I've lost my independence. I'm saving more money than you, but I'm still in a rut, I know this situation is temporary and I've got to make long term plans. You, though... you've been going places. Not the far places we dreamed of, but still places. It's good to be on the move."

We emerged at the far end of the maze to find another of us waiting. This one was scruffy and smelly, and looked at us with piercing envy.

"You lucky bastards," he spat. "I heard you whining about your lives. I'm the one who was so frozen by indecision that I never moved from my first apartment, even as the rent kept rising. I'm the one who went bankrupt and landed on the street, left to scrounge meals from dumpsters."

There was nothing we could say to him. We turned away, back toward my car. The return was a quiet affair, wordlessly reflective, communicating volumes. At last it was time to part ways and I solemnly waved goodbye to the other me as we both pondered the myriad of branches life takes.

As I turned the key I glanced over at the car seat next to me. On the seat lay a postcard, an unassuming thin piece of cardboard which had traveled all the way from Göteborg, Sweden to be with me. I thought of the friend who sent it, and all the twists and turns her life has taken. I thought of the good times we had and how those times had faded so quickly into the past. I thought of how everything is transitory and only a fool thinks he can hold things as they are. A part of me fervently hoped I would remain a fool.

The front of the postcard featured a statue of two figures locked in eternal combat behind a fountain in the night. I wondered if the figures might represent the past and the future, locked in the eternal stalemate we call the present.

Author's Note: Apologies for this story being pathetically bad, it was a challenge to construct a story around this series of ten photographs.

A murky, filtered daylight illuminated a small cave. Within the cave, a young woman awoke and rubbed her eyes in confusion. She had no memory of how she came to sleep in the cave, nor of where the cave might be.

Fighting back panic, she stepped outside to survey the area. There were no familiar landmarks, nothing to provide a clue of where she was. After taking one last look back at the cave,

she set off down a trail.

Coming around a bend, the woman found a distinctly unnatural structure looming over her. Heavily overgrown with moss-covered rocks and two small openings visible at the back, it appeared to be a forgotten remnant of an ancient civilization.



It was here that the suspicion crept into her head that she might no longer be on Earth. She looked to the sky for confirmation. She could see no sun or moons. At a glance she'd taken it to be a cloudy day, but on more careful inspection she realized that the sky was in fact a featureless gray dome through which the light shone moderately.

Curious to learn all she could about the extinct alien civilization, she walked to the back of the structure and climbed through one of the openings into a cramped tunnel. It led her out to the other side of the hill where she discovered an ancient stone staircase leading upward.



The young woman ascended the stairs, and noted the lush green ferns at the top.



The stairs had led her to a strange old building. Stepping inside, she discovered an odd crevice in the wall from which she sensed a strange power and portents of doom.



Bracing herself, she reached a hand into the crevice. Nothing happened. She reached further, and scraped against the back. There was nothing there.

Bored and discouraged by the lack of alien artifacts or dramatic action, the woman walked out the back door of the building. In the faint hope of spotting something she'd missed, she turned back to look at the overgrown house she'd just exited.



Stepping back a distance, she realized that the body of the house was a mere foot deep. She discovered a series of similar houses nearby, all equally flattened.



There was no possible conclusion but that the doors were portals to other dimensions which fit more than our three dimensions of space can display. She realized that the extinct civilization which built these structures must've been highly advanced.

The young woman pondered what could've happened to such an advanced civilization. She wandered over toward the nearby lake and quickly spotted a clue: an orange patch of ground, suggesting that an orange-blooded alien was murdered and bled to death there.



She dug around for bones or other evidence, and ended up finding a strange box. It appeared to be a time capsule containing the ancient civilization's most cherished cultural items.



The young woman decided that any civilization whose greatest achievements were travel bugs can't be worthy studying, so she closed and re-buried the box. While doing so she heard creaking noises intensifying behind her. Finally she turned around and noticed a strange tree staring at her.



The tree was telepathic, and told her of how its once great civilization became progressively more lazy until they put down roots and evolved into trees. The tree felt deeply insulted by her dismissal of its civilization's greatest time capsule, so it poked a root up through the ground and strangled the young woman with it until she died.

The End

Dear friends and family,

By the time you read this, I will be alive.

My whole life so far, I've been dead. We've all been dead. This world is dead. This universe is a shadow which only hints at the true nature of things.

Last night, a group of us sat huddled by the fireplace warming ourselves. The fire was hypnotic, and I stared into the dancing flames for what seemed like hours. I was warm and comfortable, yet uneasy. I could sense the shadows behind me, staring at the back of my head.

Consider the common shadow. We see them and think of them like objects, but there's nothing there, it's only a relative void where light is blocked. The shape we see in the shadow has nothing to do with the physical composition of the shadow (the photon shortage). The meaning of the shadow can only become clear when we step away from the wall and see the light source and the interceding object.

Unable to resist, I turned to look at the wall. It was awash with dancing shadows, surreally distorted. I picked out the shadows of my companions, of objects in the room, and finally came upon my own. Together, the fire and I created a shadow neither of us could make alone. Shaped like me but dancing with unpredictable energy, our shadow was the combined essence of man and fire.

Watching the shadows, I felt as if I were slipping into the wall. I began to imagine the world as it would be for a two dimensional creature on the wall. In my mind I saw a vast plane where light suddenly came and went. The lightening and darkening made no sense, and could never make sense without the ability to see off the wall. The people of the wall would invent a religion to explain it, and their scientists would declare the light changes a natural random phenomenon.

I felt an urge to reach into the wall and somehow pull the people of the wall out into the three dimensional room to show them the fire and the objects which determine their experiences.

I stood and turned all around, taking in the room as if for the first time. The shallowness of it struck me. I could feel that this world was as limited as the wall, and that the things all around me were like mysterious shadows I'd learned not to question.

We are all shadows, three dimensional creatures in a four dimensional universe. Something much deeper and truer is happening behind the world we see, just out of reach.

Since last night, I've thought of nothing but escape. I asked myself what a two dimensional creature on the wall could do to gain access to our world. I realized that fire is the key. Fire is the origin point, the creator of light and shadow, the source of everything observable on the wall. By carefully recording the shadow patterns, the two dimensional creatures can calculate the location of the fire in the third dimension.

Tonight I'm going to sneak out into the common area, leap into the fireplace and fall through the fire to a higher dimension. I don't know if I'll be able to come back, so I'm leaving this note on my bed to let you know what happened to me.

Love,

Jonah Sheridan
Elkville Sanitarium