There is a man who goes by the same letter I do. He sings in a band called Eels. I have always loved the band. I lost track of it for a while and then I found it again, later, after a lot had happened, which is the right time to find most things.

The man lost everyone. His father, first. Then his sister. Then his mother. Then a cousin, who was working on one of the planes on September 11. He is the only one of his family left.

His father was a physicist. He is the one who said that whenever the world could go more than one way, it goes every way. Every branch happens. There is not one world. There are many, all at once, and you are in a great number of them.

His sister left a note. She wrote that she was leaving this world to be with their father in the other ones.

The man says he does not know much about math, or physics. He tried anyway. He did his best to understand his father's work, and to understand his own life next to it, and he found peace with all of it. I do not know how he did that. I believe him.

I have a lot in common with him. One of the things is that we have both lost a great deal.

Another is that I was told about the many worlds before I knew there was any physics for it. Voices told me, and people, and things that came to me in my head. They said the worlds were there, long before I had read a word about it. That was eerie, and scary, and in some strange way calming. The scariest moments of my life were the times it looked like the worlds were touching, like one was reaching into another. It is not like that now.

Here is what I know about, which is water.

I went down off Belize, where you can see your own arm. There is the coral, which is a city. Past the coral the floor drops away into trenches, and along the edge of them there are highways. The big fish travel the highways in a line, going somewhere, not looking at you. Then a moray eel puts its head out of a hole in the rock and makes a face at you. That is its world, the hole. You are in it for a second, and it lets you know.

It is a whole different world down there, and it is in this one.

There is a world on my toenail right now. A whole universe of things on it, doing things. There are worlds on those things too. Every size you go down there is another one, and every size you go up. Infinitely many worlds, inside this one. I know that is not exactly what the physics means. I do not know much about physics either. But to me that alone is the many worlds.

Some people hear that there are infinitely many of them going on at once, infinitely many of you, and it is too much. It was too much for me, at times. Now I find great peace in it.

I came up and lay on my back with the stone on my chest. I am in this one. I am going back down after this.