I really don’t know any more how it happened. We were sitting in the car and suddenly there was this bright light and some unbearable noise.
I had rubbed some dirt off a chopped tomato tin from our grocery shopping at Aldi and all of a sudden this impeccably dressed guy in a 1930s cocktail tuxedo outfit was sitting next to me in the car.
He introduced himself as Edgar Vauclart and insisted I call him Eddy. You can imagine my surprise. Eddy cut straight to the chase. He had read my essay „Would you swap your life?” and was so enthusiastic about my apparent wish to swap my life with someone else that he had a grand plan laid out for me.
In fact, he said, I would swap my life with five other people. For real! He further explained it wouldn’t be like real swapping but I would rather be a visitor in their respective brains. And then I could decide if I want to be them. Forever.
My emotional discomfort, some would call it terror, went through the roof.
My sister and her boyfriend sitting in the front of the car didn’t notice a thing. When I told them, they were laughing and saying I was overworked and just tired and imagining things.
Was I bending reality and inventing wild fantasies just to make my life more interesting than it actually was?
↝ 🧝🏻♂️ OLIVER
The genie, apologies, I meant Eddy, didn’t give me a choice to further ponder over any details. The next day I woke up and opened my eyes, I felt something really strange between my legs. For crying out loud. It is an erection. I thought it was all a bad dream.
I get up. It is not just me, but somehow it is me. It is us. I am mentally piggybacking on someone else’s body and brain. Sweet Baby Jesus, I am going to lose it. The very different way of going to the loo is so embarrassing. Or no, actually, I correct myself here. It is so easy. I love it. And great, no brushing your teeth either. What? Why? I do always brush my teeth.
But then, look at my reflection in the mirror. Oh no, we don’t need to brush our teeth. I am looking adorably adorable. I am a raw and young Ryan Gosling. My face is the epitome of masculine prettiness. I am a look-at-him guy. We are the most handsome saviour of the planet. How great, we will go out, we will conquer the world. So good!
Next thing I know is we are going to a building. Is it an office building. It is an oddly shaped skyscraper in central London where some banks and mostly boutique trading houses are located. I am greeted. People seem to like me and take notice of me.
We are the facility manager. But we are torn, we rather think of ourself as janitor. Hands on, keeping it real. That is who we are. Good so far for me, I like the down-to-earth approach. I have figured out by now that our name is Oliver. Did you known that the name “Oliver” has both French and British origins? The name might come from Latin “olivarius”, meaning “olive tree planter” or “olive branch bearer”. That is so interesting, maybe that is why Oliver is the janitor, he is a custodian, a care taker. I think it is a great opportunity to meet people of different walks of life!
Turns out that I met a lot of other people. In particular extremely attractive female and male interns in an intimate way. It was telling. It was, oh, so sexual, and oh, so direct. I do not want to go into any further detail. The sexuality of the encounters I piggybacked on were enough to sustain my sexual fantasies for a lifetime. Did I frame that correctly? I closed our eyes and fell asleep.
⇉ 👭 AGNES
I woke up the next day expecting to have a bit of rest and deliberation to make sense of things. Some time to re-organise and get myself together again. I went to my wardrobe and looked at myself in the mirror. I am Agnes, a mid-40s woman with dark circles under my eyes, and she is starring back at me.
I knew somehow, I was in Berlin but I didn’t have much time to think as suddenly three voices were yelling: “Moooom, are you coming down for breakfast?” It dawned on me very suddenly. I am a mother!
One voice was distinctly different. That would be my husband. How would he be like? Remember, I am only piggybacking on other people’s memory, so I don’t really know how the guy looks and feels like! Or the children, would they be little boys or girls, or would they be teenagers? Coming down the stairs of the maisonette we are apparently living in, I was mesmerised by the scene I was presented with. A guy in his late 40s, he is Leo, he is overweight, still a kind and attractive face, but rather pale looking. He seems tired, as I am.
And then I saw them! The twins! Oh, how lovely those two little cuties were. Seven years old, Helene and Genoveva, called Genny, their birthday is in two weeks. Their faces were glowing with pride as they had prepared a pancake breakfast. How adorable is that!
I am happy, I am tired, and I feel the most profound worry I have ever known. A worry not for me, but for them, the twins. It is almost unbearable. Leo asks me if I can drive the kids to their music lesson today. He cannot, he has a meeting. I can, I hear myself say, of course, because I am a house wife. I do part-time jobs so we get by. Leo is working as editor in a publishing house, he is sophisticated and he hates the business side of his work. He is an uncommercial publisher.
I feel strange when thinking about Leo. Do we still have any feelings for him? How surprising, I think in our collective brain, to ask myself the question if we even love him? Leo and I are a team, but we don’t really function as a romantic couple anymore. When my mind continues to stray, I feel immediate resistance from the original (as Eddy calls my potential life swappers). I stop and give in. It is uncomfortable not being in sync with my temporary hostess.
I drive the girls to their music lesson, I go back, I clean the house, I clean everything there. I fall asleep while sitting for a moment on the sofa.
↠ 🧑🏻💻 CLAIRE
A harsh sound at 4.30AM wakes me up. I am confused, yet we are not. I am used to getting up at that time. Went to bed at 9PM, so all good. Except I really didn’t sleep all the way through. I was worrying about several issues. One being how to have more of my staff engaging in my most recent campaign of “How to draw your employees into your ways of achieving”. I am Claire Woodawill. I am the CEO of “Closed Pink”. I own the sustainable salmon skin recycling market. I am a legend.
I’ll go and run first before I formally address any issues. I run. And I think. There will be a way. I am running. I am thinking. Why wouldn’t they agree with me in the first place? Backstabbers. What are they hiding? Are they planning a take-over? We are thinking about our board members. I have created this venture, it is mine, I was the one with the creative ideas. Should I not have sold my dear baby to them? They want to oust me, don’t they? They want to replace ME! Yes, they want to, don’t they? After all I have done for this company, the days and evenings and weekends I have invested into them and their shareholder value. Could I have done it any differently? Without selling such a big share of our company? Shareholder value my ass.
In particular, this Brendan guy is onto me. He is my number two. He is sleek, he is gay, he is worldly, he is not drinking, he is not smoking, he is exercising, he has a stable relationship with a 25-year-old (Brendan is 48). He is so very much annoying. It hurts. Okay, stop focusing on this annoyance, think strategy for the next campaign, come on, think harder!
I take a shower and make my way to the office. It is in London’s bohemian district of Clerkenwell. A lot of famous creatives are there. I used to hang with Zaha Hadid before she sadly passed away. Good old times.
I am entering the office, my office. Everyone knows us of course, the mainly millennial staff admire us, albeit they are too shy coming up and speaking with us. It is admiration from afar. We love it. Power feels good. It is rewarding. I am a sucker for attention.
Our office space is lovely. It is bright and cosy with big windows from ceiling to floor overlooking a garden. The design is inviting, not too cool. Diffuse light comes in from the adjacent corridor, too, as we insisted on not being cut off from other rooms, but having a frosted glass-block wall instead. My wooden retro desk is full of post-it notes and to-do lists. We smile. Now, we think, that isn’t very environmentally friendly, isn’t it? We should make an effort and move to mobile phone notes only. But the profound satisfaction of ripping a post-it note with a task done off the desk surface, that is heaven! Our little internal chat with ourselves is interrupted by a knock on our birch plywood door.
Brendan enters the room. All smiles. Wants to go over the next campaign budget. We did that already in yesterday’s board meeting. What does he have up his sleeve now again? Did a certain board member ask him to scrutinise my numbers? We know Brendan is deceptive; he is a manipulator. Always an ear for gossip in the company. His information through the grapevine is invaluable and he shares what is beneficial for him. Brendan is a shit-stirrer par excellence. And always schmoozing with the board. He is so transparent to us though.
“Brendan, darling, what is it?” I hear myself say.
We are having dinner with an attractive guy. He contacted us through a dating app my assistant is curating for us. He is cute. He is very tactile. I leave early. I am preoccupied. I need to think next steps to annihilate Brendan. Night falls.
↬ 🧑🏻🎤 POPSIE
I wake up again. I am not sure where I am. I am now used to the wild life aka waking up to surprises. I am in the firm and disturbing hands of Edgar Vauclart, sorry, Eddy. I know I won’t be myself, but will yet again join another person’s life.
We open our eyes to a sunrise only a penthouse abode can make you experience. I am high up. Very high up. I am amidst the London skyline and I am seeing the sun coming up. I am in a flat in the iconic “The Shard”, London’s supertall skyscraper. I seem to be living the dream. Who am I?
I touch my boobs and feel my stomach and my legs. Extraordinarily firm. Soft skin. I am fit. I am a super model. I am Penka Ladumiranova, called Popsie. I grew up in a suburb of Sofia, Bulgaria’s beautiful capital. I am 28 years old.
I have to go to the gym. We are a bit tired, yet I am pleasantly surprised, we are incredibly fresh. That is because we don’t indulge in alcohol. But we are hungry. All the time. Our diet plan is strict. We only eat four times a week. We drink black coffee or green tea to calm the hunger in between. Before a show, we don’t even drink water, the dehydration makes your muscles more toned and keeps your tummy flat.
On Tuesday, we had a little bowl of soup so we wouldn’t get too sick. We can also have a tiny piece of cheese on a water cracker. On Saturday, we’d have a small fillet steak without salt or any sauce. We are running on nervous energy as well as fierce discipline. And most importantly, we mustn’t disappoint our mother.
Last year, my modelling contracts brought in just under $9M. What could you do with all that money. Exciting! I am immediately dreaming of so many projects. My own art gallery brand, a worldwide social hub project, a co-living network with locations dotted around the globe. Weirdly, we don’t feel that. What I just thought is only an echo from my previous me-alone-without-Popsie-in-my-brain life.
We don’t have any desires to branch out or do things differently, we just want to be with our parents and our three younger siblings. Mother has hired someone to take care of our money. Here, I notice, that our brain waves split for a second. I understand that Popsie’s wealth manager has built up a large stock and property portfolio, mainly in the US and Asia, but Popsie doesn’t address this directly in her thinking patterns. I am spiritually drifting away in my very own musings. Suddenly, a sharp pull yanks me back to our shared existence.
No, we don’t want to get involved. This whole investing lingo is highly boring, we find. So is all of the talk of developing models into brands. That is for others. Gigi and Bella are good at it. Kylie, too. We find this activity a nuisance. We are calling my mother. We want to speak with her and tell her about the latest shows and where we are supposed to travel next. Pieter Mulier from Maison Alaïa has just booked us, our model agency has informed us this morning. We want our family to come and meet us in Paris. They cannot. I am crying on the phone. I am desperate. I am exhausted and I am hungry. I black out.
⤇ 👮🏻♂️ GEORGE
The next person I am to join is George, a divorced policeman from Nottingham having an affair with Celest, a married nanny from Wolverhampton. They met online on “Adult Friend Finder”, a hook up site for married people. That was and is true for Celest, yet George’s wife found out very quickly, only 4 weeks into George’s affair, and there was no negotiation. George’s wife demanded divorce, and pronto please.
This made George rather sad. It wasn’t that much fun and excitement anymore cheating on your wife when one didn’t have a wife to hide secrets from. So, while George went into depression, Celest decided to try more than one lover adding Paul to her dating roster.
Celest must be a busy woman. And so organised, we thought. And so attractively independent. While George and I were driving to Birmingham and pondering over Celest’s wondrous and hurtful ways, I had a sort of breakdown in George’s brain. No more! I was screaming. The car was still stable but I could feel that George somehow got affected and felt rather dizzy.
And suddenly Eddy appeared in the same brain, too. Eddy always said the original only feels a slight headache and even experiences some bursts of creativity after joining their brain.
That seemed far from the truth as George fainted while I was panicking and the car started skidding. The M42 wasn’t exactly an untravelled road that Friday afternoon and the car was beginning to bump into vehicles driving alongside us. A clear business case for self-driving cars here! Suddenly all became creamy warm white coloured around me and I was floating.
➔
Next thing I see is Eddy sitting across from me at a table in a little café in South London’s Bermondsey Street. He was cross. His eyes were transfixed with contempt. Without knowing I had sabotaged the fifth and last life swapping experience he had designed for me.
“Why”, Eddy inquired incredulously, “would you then voice the desire to swap your life? This is confusing and a waste of time for us eternal granters of human wishes.”
I blushed and looked embarrassedly down to my brightly coloured socks (they were turquoise with chameleon comic prints and oh, I had never noticed before, sparkled with orange and pink dots!).
Eddy got impatient as I didn’t answer.
“Oh, I am so sorry”, I said, now extremely embarrassed, “I was just dreaming the what-ifs, I guess, when I thought about swapping my life.”
Eddy took a long look at me. He had noticed my socks now, too. He sighed resignedly and vanished into thin air with a whisper “Don’t you bloody waste my time anymore and get on with your own life. Ungrateful earthlings. Always the Europeans!”
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