Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

A recent YouTube search for something else led me to a how-to video on land transference and group deeds . . . in the virtual world known as Second Life. Turns out, one can purchase everything from biscuits for their avatar dog, to a virtual silver-studded leather jacket, to a renovated kitchen for one’s imaginary urban loft. The virtual world turned twenty years old this summer, enough time for users to program a free market parallel to our own.

Frankly, I’m struggling with the realities of our offline economy, and lately, the seemingly insurmountable issues we face IRL: war, political discord, mass shootings. But that’s just the thing with roleplaying communities: they grant reprieve from our very human and very startling challenges. They permit entry into worlds where we can pursue an existence much different than our current reality, with all of its missed opportunities and deferred dreams. What we cannot have in this life—say, peace—we can render in another.

Today’s poem plunges into the mental exercise of that imagining, where the “What-if” scenarios instigate an even stronger hold on this actual moment.

In the Seam of Life
by Rachel Galvin

In the mirror I’m watching my alternate life
I mean: this life I seem to be living is actually the other life I might have lived

You know how you or your friends sometimes think
what if I hadn’t married X or taken that job or had those kids?

Oh I should’ve been a pianist, my high school social studies teacher 
used to tell me. Oh I should’ve been an actor, my father would say

I always wonder what kind of sex life
I would have if I didn’t have those two boys, my friend confides

over a glass of wine. Maybe I would be sleeping with women
instead of men. Yes, definitely sleeping with women

Here I am dancing before a mirror watching my alternate life unfold
I’ve kept my figure, as they say. I have a night life and a sex life

and a creative life and an intellectual life and I’m even growing
some plant life on my windowsill and some bacterial life in my shower

Watching myself dance in the middle of these years
in which I am single and living alone. What am I getting at?

What I’m trying to describe to you isn’t déjà vu
it’s more like the rumble of a movie playing in the theater next door

Families eating laughing arguing putting food on each other’s plates 
as I trudge through the snow by a fleet of restaurants docked like cruise ships

I switch to a film in which I too have a family and am putting some food 
on my daughter’s plate, I greet my other life in an effusion of glowing lights

I note how the feeling of comfort and assured futurity is made manifest 
by a mass-produced lamp that glows Relaxing Golden Amber #60

The truth is I long for the lamps the messy plates the children’s laughter
but I don’t know how to enter the restaurant I’m passing by

on a frozen April evening. It used to bother me more, but now
I see that even if there were one, I couldn’t find the door

“In the Seam of Life'' by Rachel Galvin from UTEROTOPIA, © 2022, Rachel Galvin. Used by permission of Persea Books.