From Jeannette Winterson's Oranges are Not the only Fruit...

"I bought the mince and the onions and found that Trickett's snack bar was still in the same place serving the same things. Betty still had the tape round her spectacles, all these years after Mona had dropped her beefburgers on top of them. She didn't know who I was, and I didn't want to talk about it. I was beginning to wonder if I'd ever been anywhere. My mother was treating me like she always had; had she noticed my absence? Did she even remember why I'd left?

I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. Some people's emanations are very strong, some people create themselves afresh outside of their own body. This is not fancy. If a potter has an idea, she makes it into a pot, and it exists beyond her, in its own separate life. She uses a physical substance to display her thoughts. If I use a metaphysical substance to display my thoughts, I might be anywhere at one time, influencing a number of different things, just as the potter and her pottery can exert influence in different places. There's a chance that I'm not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along all the choices I did and didn't make, for a moment brush against each other. That I am still an evangelist in the North, as well as the person who ran away.

Perhaps for a while these two selves have become confused. I have not gone forward or back in time, but across in time, to something I might have been, playing itself out."