The worlds of interconnectedness

Part II: The nature of love

David Cuddyback and Livvy would meet is almost every potential world. Some worlds, most worlds, would be about their love. In others, Livvy would find the stranger from Utah quite distasteful. There were those odd worlds, infrequent though they were, in which one of the other two did not exist.

There were worlds in which Livvy had allowed the frequent excursions with newly met men become a lifestyle, a life in which Cuddyback was just another sexual partner of whom she would have no lasting memory. Interesting, through, in many of those worlds, she would feel a sense of loss after spending a night of meaningless and degraded sex with the man.

Love has been talked about, lived, experienced, and described in just about every way fashionable. It would be difficult to tell most love stories without resorting to some menagerie of clichés describing what turns out to not be the oldest emotion in the history of mankind, but it’s most important.

Love defined the search that led Cuddyback and Livvy together. A love that neither could fully grasp, nor explain to others, had been nothing like a destiny. There were no fairy tale first dates. There were no grand gestures.

In many of the worlds, they two would meet right there in Portland. Not always at O’Dowd’s, but almost always in Portland. Sometimes, in alternate existence, they would meet in Green River and become acquaintances via mail before making their ultimate choices. This is to say that love was something which would find them together in just about every world. Sometimes, that was through the more circuitous route, sometimes through this direct route.

Jeff Smith, the amnesiac from Columbis could never understand the love felt by the couple. He would never know what it felt like to be anyone other than an amnesiac. He would, however, have been fascinated by the growth of a couple from two simple existences melting into one through conversation. Their conversations were not that of story books, romantic comedies, or fairy tales. They were intimate conversations about the mundane existence in which both lived. There were the days of sunshine, days of rain, days of a dystopian nightmare that played out in front of their eyes.

They would watch news and cry. They would talk. Eat dinner with her parents. Sitting together watching the world go by. Oftentimes Livvy, sharp witted and acidic with her tongue, would make comments so seemingly bitter one was left to wonder what the more than athletically built man was doing hanging around such negativity. The world never passed Livvy by. Livvy cared little for how others perceived her words. But she heard the criticisms.