There is so much about the universe we know, yet so much we may never understand. How on earth could we ever grasp everything about an endless abyss of gases, galaxies and flaming spheres forming and exploding overhead while we sit down here restless and bemoaning the mundane?
Life’s questions are big, HUGE. And more complex than I can wrap my silly human brain around. If a turtle loses its shell, is it homeless or naked? If a vampire bites a zombie, does the zombie become a vampire or does the vampire become a zombie? Do fish get thirsty? What happens if you get scared half to death twice?
Then there’s the old chestnuts that make us question our own fragile existence and our place in this upside down world.
What in the hell are we doing here? How did this happen? Is there a God or some higher power in charge? If this is all by design, how do we know we’re operating by the map that was assigned to us?
Are we puppets in some universal “Truman Show”? Is there life on another planet pulling the strings? Or do we have parallel versions of ourselves living la vida loca in some alternate dimension?
Nothing could be crazier than what we have going on down here.
If I were dropped into a “Sliding Doors” version of my life, would I survive or would I treat it like a training ground and take what I learned to put into practice in my “real” life? How do we know if we’re living the life that we’re supposed to live?
This alternate version of myself could be out there living the life that was pre-destined to belong to me but slipped through my fingers like a puddle in my hands. Maybe I went left when I was supposed to take a right, thus altering my course forever?
How many “Liza Mitchells” are out there wandering the planet with my same name? Do they have hair that’s neither all curly nor all straight, eyes that change color with the weather, that one wiry eyebrow hair that often stands at attention like an albino Brundle Fly?
I wondered how deep the similarities run. How much can we share with a perfect stranger operating with a name or genetic code (don’t get me started on doppelgängers) that is too close for comfort? How far is that reflection a reflection of ourselves?
Won’t the real Liza Mitchell please stand up?
Fueled by curiosity and caffeine, I sent my name out into the World Wide Web and what flooded back was a diverse cross section of women all carrying around a driver’s license bearing my same name but given the demographics, all living very different lives from my own.
A data analytics tutor in her third year as an accounting student poised to graduate this summer.
An Aspen-based ecologist and Natural Resource Planner with a robust skillset that includes backcountry skiing.
The founding director of a fashion house in London who is well-traveled and looks great in skinny jeans.
A nursing lecturer honored for discovering breakthroughs in skin cancer research in African American and minority patients that undergo organ transplants.
A wife and mother somewhere in the Pacific Northwest with a shared passion for taking photos of beautiful things. Bikes resting against a pier stretched over clear blue waters, a glass of white sparkling in the afternoon sun, a sweet blonde toddler with soft, chubby hands, patterned royal blue tiles, friends.
The 92-year-old with my name and my mother’s middle name died in Cartersville, GA on the 4th of July.
I was born on Bastille Day – the French Independence Day.
“Liza was a strong independent woman that loved her family.”
She was the firstborn of 17 children, survived by her own seven kids and two bonus children. Not only did the church-going, saint-of-a-good-cook see to her own family, she looked after two extra kids in the family that she helped raise for 30 years.
I asked the universe to expound on its answer in 50 words or less.
“Who is Liza Mitchell?” I asked.
The first entry made me cackle out loud. Instantly, I wanted to befriend this person and also invest in some cheap online erotica.
“Liza writes quick and steamy romances with alpha men and outspoken heroines. She is an avid reader and coffee drinker with a passion for spending as little time in reality as possible. Liza is a hobby farmer, wife, and mother wearing black and herding cats...”
At my age, I don’t have the time, energy or inclination for a career pivot that sees me earning any advanced degrees or making any worthwhile contribution to medical science.
My child-bearing years are but a speck in the rearview and I have neither the closet space or emotional space to raise anyone else’s offspring.
But the image of an outdoorsy goth with a choppy bob sipping artisanal cold brew out on the back 40 while daydreaming of a hot, sweaty farmhand and wrangling a circus of barn cats whispered seductively in my ear like one of the lusty heroines in her catalog of suggestive titles.
“So, you just wander the woods asking men to tie you up and take you?”
“No,” she answered quietly. “Only you.”
“Louder.”
“Only you,” she gasped.
“Arms up.”
(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51972862-on-her-trail)
I may prefer my nature in a climate-controlled environment, and would one hundred percent get mauled by a bear because I have terrible horror movie instincts, but that “Liza Mitchell” made me believe in the odd bird living in a small coastal beach hamlet with a penchant for vintage and a pathological quest to save a 60-year-old newspaper from becoming a sad footnote.
Maybe that’s just the sort of thing one of her heroines would do before meeting a sweaty press foreman with rippling biceps and news ink under the very fingernails he used trace the soft curve of her neck. . .
“She's always had a sharp tongue, and now [s]he could finally do something about it...
Using shades from this palette of accomplished mothers, naturalists, artists, practitioners and writers, I colored in the faint outline of myself and felt grounded; complete, although I still have lingering questions about the whole vampire thing.
Life may not always take you where you thought you’d end up. It bobs and weaves, travels up steep hills and deep into treacherous valleys.
It can be melancholy, cloudy stretches of loneliness tinged with regret; frustration when the notion of a soft, round happily-ever-after doesn’t fit in the sharp angles of “real life.”
There will be dishes in the sink, 46 empty water bottles in the car, a less than optimal bank balance. But there’s also laughter, love, music, ice cold martinis and maybe a trick for keeping that rogue eyebrow hair at bay.
We may not have the answers to all of life’s big questions, but living the life you have without hesitation makes it art.
And that’s enough.