They tricked me back then and had me plant a tree. Out on the west side of town. Dig a hole with others and put a young tree in it. They tricked me, and we planted those trees that I thought would grow into a grove. But they didn’t. I’ve looked at Google, and they aren’t there.
They tricked me back then and took me to an election night celebration. A middle school boy with grown-up high school girls in the big city on the big night after weeks of walking door to door distributing leaflets. “You’ll be able to tell them about the great election of ’72,” he said. But I can’t. No one wants to know.
They tricked me back then and took me to the moon. To the moon and to Mars. To Mars and to Jupiter. They said we’d go to those places, and I believed we would and couldn’t quite understand those who didn’t think we should. But we haven’t, and we won’t. The robots do it better, anyway.
They say we live in a multiverse. I say we do, too, because I find myself in a place where those trees don’t grown, in a place where that election is an embarrassment, stuck down here looking around in a place that I don’t quite recognize.
Oh my god, David. You can’t send that. Your mother will cry.
It’s not so sad. And anyway, it’s not really true. But still…