Solace in String Theory

This all depends on a very large presumption. But I'm nothing if not presumptuous. So I dispense with conditions. Somewhere out there I'm happy. I have a seventeen year old getting ready to start college. She looks like me but pretty sans the testosterone. Flowing black hair and my eyes and nose and pigeon toes. Someplace else my kid's six or thereabouts if memory serves. A boy and he looks like his mother. Catlike eyes and cheekbones, fair-skinned and gangly. Distinctly Asian unlike his Father, a beautiful boy.

In these far-flung someplaces I tried and chose them and not me. An unheard of litany for one so selfish. Consent sometimes relent the paltry extent of my effort given...but never if it inconveniences.

In either someplace I married their Mothers, my lovely children. Entirely different worlds these, for one can nary exist aside the other. But one also couldn't and find me completely content. Unhappiness and happy unlikely bedfellows in these perfect worlds of mine because I never loved them. The women and not the children who I adore as much as one can. Who are not for so simple a matter as, as...as I sit here I can't find a word worthy of my transgression. Pregnancies looked upon as elaborate ruse with which to entrap me. What miracles viewed as albatross by that bastard I no longer wish to be.

What have I done? I often think to myself while at play with my sisters' children. Their faces familiar faces of those one's I'd never known. Joy to me in their every laugh and tirade. I look to them and wonder if I could possibly love someone more than I do them. I look and I wonder if it isn't time to find out.

As I wrap this up the twin toddlers, Elyse and Emma, storm in to sit on my lap and "type" and then I think I couldn't possibly, but I find happiness in the vision of me settling for just as much.