So, this story will likely be 8-10 times this length if I ever actually get around to cleaning it up and rounding it out a bit. I don't think it will get boring, if I work things the right way. Maybe some sort of preface indicating that it's based on true events. Or some such hogwash.

Anyhoo, for your reading pleasure (also suggestions, commentary, edits and even the HARSHEST of constructive criticism are very strongly encouraged)

Sometimes, instead of just experiencing things that actually happen (you know, like normal people), I see something that might've happened but didn't. It tends to be something someone does, or doesn't do, but thought they might do, then decided not to do, but I see them doing it. Sometimes it's a pretty small thing, like a professor saying they're extending an assignment until Monday, which when Friday comes 'round and they collect it is a real bother for me, especially since they often don't remember (or at least don't acknowledge) that they were thinking of extending it, and certainly have no reason to think that I misinterpreted their actions by listening to their thoughts. I mean, it's just common sense. People don't hear thoughts. And I agree. It's not other people's thoughts I experience. It's the actions they never took. And that's what's so blasted irritating about it. I can't tell them what they were thinking or how they were thinking it, because all I saw was the execution. And since they didn't actually do it, they have no idea what the execution looked like and I come out looking like a crazy person speaking in gobbledy-gook.

But it really does happen. And it's not just in little exasperations such as the prior example. It's been things like, at concerts, the band playing a song that they didn't actually play. It isn't on any recorded copy of the setlist, or on youtube, or in the official concert video. I've met the band for an autograph and mentioned one of the songs I had just watched them play as my favorite, and had them say, oh yeah, sorry we didn't play that one. And I just file it away, another example of weirdness. Sometimes it's nice, I guess, to hear a song that never played. I've had that on the radio as well; a song comes on and I really like it, so I write down the title and the band and look it up, but later when I hear it again it's a completely different song - new tune, new lyrics, everything. Maybe they've even switched out a band member. And the original version I heard is nowhere to be found. No recording of it exists. I try listening through their entire discography - maybe the DJ had the song's name wrong. But no luck. It's the same band, to be sure, and the sound is even a bit similar. But it's not the same song. I realized, after this happened a few different times, that these were occasions where the band rewrote a song. There have been more minor changes as well, lyrics that got patched up before recording and I somehow heard the original a time or two. But it tends to only happen the first time I'm listening to something, or when the information is new. Which is extremely frustrating. I distinctly remember, once in my youth, getting permission to be out after curfew.  Later that night, I was grounded for arriving home late.

I don't like how it means I'm missing something. After all, my mind only processes at the speed of time, and fluid though time may be, it seems I don't get both sides of reality. If I hear that the assignment is extended until Monday, I am missing the part where the professor says that the assignment will be due on Friday, no exceptions. If I hear one version of the lyrics, I have no idea what they've been changed to, and people have no idea what I'm on about when it's stuck in my head and I'm singing to myself at school the next day.

Once it was a whole concert. The band had considered stopping in my town, but wasn't able to, and I went and attended the show. I was later asked why I had been listening to a Korean nu-death-gulag-metal band, but wasn't able to recall any such particular show. However, that's what it says on the ticket, and so I suppose the entire British pop experience I had on that date came from the land of CouldHaveBeen.

The worst thing about it is, it doesn't happen every day. My little trips and glimpses into what could have been only happen very infrequently, to my knowledge. Or maybe they just tend to be such insignificant things that it is rarely pointed out to me that it's happened. Just little bits and snippets of an alternate reality, seeping into my mind, and no way to know when it's going to happen. I can't tell it apart from regular reality while it's happening, and afterward, I don't know it's happened until some contradictory bit of evidence comes to mind - usually unpleasantly.

It tends to be things I hear, or see. Though once I could have sworn I'd slept with someone who told me, in no uncertain terms, that no such thing had ever happened, nor would it in the future.

I wonder if I've actually written any of this down, or if I will find that I've written a literary analysis of a book I thought I hadn't read, but apparently decided to after all. Maybe when I turn on my video games I will find that I didn't actually make that last six hours of progress, and all the while I was reading instead. Which would be a terrible fate, really. Because I remember the progress quite clearly, and it would be dreadfully boring to have to experience it again.

But, who knows. Maybe my own decisions and actions are immune to this weird dimensional bleedthrough. Maybe I only see others' potential realities. Maybe that's why I mis-hear people so very often, or mis-remember our conversations. Maybe I'm not even real at all, but people could have been talking to me if I was, so that's what I perceive.

I wonder if that could be said of everyone.