So the day after the dream I did the thing everybody does now, which is I sat at my kitchen table at two in the afternoon like some kind of insomniac maniac and typed the whole mess into a search bar. Feel like I don’t belong on earth. Homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. The works. I figured I’d get ads for cruises and one of those quizzes that tells you your attachment style, and I’d feel even crazier than when I started.
Instead I got a word. Just sitting there like it had been waiting for me to finally show up. Wanderer. Capital W, like it’s somebody’s name.
I want to be straight with you, because I’ve got no patience for this kind of thing as a rule. I’m the guy at the party rolling his eyes at the crystals. Somebody starts in about their past lives and I suddenly need to go check on the drinks. So when I tell you this stuff is a stack of conversations somebody wrote down in the nineteen-eighties — a guy asking questions and some voice answering through a woman lying on a bed — you understand I expected to laugh.
I didn’t laugh. Here’s the part that knocked the wind out of me, if you want to know the truth. According to this material there are millions of us. The fellow asking the questions back in 1981 got a number — around sixty million. Sixty million people walking around down here who aren’t, strictly speaking, from here. Who signed up. Who volunteered to come into the mess on purpose, and then mostly forgot they did, and now spend their whole lives feeling like the one kid at the sleepover who wants to go home.
And then I found a later one — same voices, somebody asking the same question years on — and the number had moved. Three hundred and fifty million now, give or take. It had multiplied by six while nobody was looking. Like reinforcements. Like somebody upstairs took one look at the mess down here and started calling up the reserves, wave after wave after wave. And not just our kind, either — a whole other crowd on top of us, half a billion of them, coming in from other worlds that already graduated, here to lend a hand with whatever it is that’s about to happen.
Hundreds of millions. And I’d spent forty-one years thinking it was a personal defect.
I sat there a long time. Then I did something I hadn’t done since I was about nine, which is I cried, except not because I was sad. I was relieved. The way you go loose all over when somebody finally says out loud the thing you were too scared to say first.