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‘CAN YOU SPOT THE TEN DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THESE TWO IMAGES?’

The game in the ad seemed quite simple. Two images, side by side, largely indistinguishable from each other, displayed before me on the computer screen. It vexed my curiosity. It demanded my attention. A stylish looking woman, dressed in flapper-era attire, reclined in the image while laughing haughtily to herself in a well-stocked library, a glass of brandy clasped in one delicately ivory hand. No wait, the image on the right has a glass of whisky instead. There we go. First one down. I find the magnifying glass in the top right, the missing doorknob on the study door that’s been left open and askew, the difference in the length of the ladder reaching up to the top row of books, the different colored high heels she’s wearing, and the missing cigarette in the ash tray beside her quite easily after that. Rapid fire. One after another. I’ve already found the first six in speedy succession.

The differences between her blonde bob haircuts, cut to frame her face elegantly were more difficult to spot. The artist did a nice job making it subtle. Strange, there’s something familiar about her, but I can’t put my finger on it. Quickly, before finishing that thought, I note that the text on the newspaper, laid neatly beside her on a roll top desk, has different headlines. One plainly pictured a family embracing outside of a courthouse with a single word headline, ‘EXONERATED!’ above it, while the other featured, above the image of a desolate businessman with his tie missing and his white collar askew, ‘HELP ME, GOVERNOR SMITH!’

I scan my eyes carefully over the two not so dissimilar images. Left to right. Top to bottom. One corner to the other. Trying my damnedest to find the remaining three differences between each one. The missing book on the bookshelf over on the left took me a few seconds longer after I had found the newspaper, but I felt a soothing rush at not being bested by such a simple game when my eyes finally landed on it. As soon as I noted the book, I noticed the stripes on the woman’s dress were ever so slightly inverted. That’s nine. Only one left. But no matter how long I lingered, poring over the two images, they only seemed to blend into one. I sat there for hours, studying them, taking mental notes and cataloguing the subtle nuances of each one, but felt myself grow no closer to deciphering their elusive variation.

Between the two similar images, distinct in their indistinctness, was a blank space, a ‘gutter’, much like a comic strip would have. As my eyes bounced from one image to the next, the gutter seemed to take on an otherworldly dimension, containing the vastness of this woman’s life and all of the possible avenues that might have led from one image to the next. Into this immense chasm I tumbled. What could have transpired between the two? Was this the same woman in the same place on two different occasions? I narrowed my eyes to try and perceive even the slightest amount of grey in her hair or the onset of wrinkles around the corners of her eyes to no avail, trying to parse out the passage of time.

I began to doubt my initial notions about her. Maybe she was not laughing at all. Was it a cry of pain that held her jaw just so? Her eyes were difficult to make out, barely being light-blue tinged slots. Were those tears, perhaps? I agonized over the thought that it was something I had done to make her sad, recognizing at once the irrationality of my own thoughts. It’s a damned game, you fool! But my mind continued to transfix itself, contorting every which way, trying to ascertain the exact nature of her circumstances in life. I wondered if she was dependent on another to provide for her or if she was a self-made woman of renowned independence, whether she had climbed society through a careful maneuvering of the educational system or if she had been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, waited on hand and foot without ever having a care in the world besides what she might wear that evening.

I could not shake the feeling, no matter how absurd, that the final difference between her in the first image and her in the second may have been something I said or something I did. Was it me? Was it my fault? I felt a closeness to her that was carved in two, into its own immense chasm.

I imagined what it would have been like to meet while we were both young and full of life. I wondered if, in the beginning, I would have been off-putting and cocky or if I would have made it difficult for us to build a connection because of shyness, self-conscious in the presence of rare beauty. She seemed like the kind of woman who had an intense caring about her, forcing me to pull the car over on busy rural highways to help turtles finish crossing over, while having a very particular music taste, commandeering the car radio with every trip. It worried me how much time I would have spent by now waiting for her to be ready to walk out the door, not just for dates, but for basic errands that needed to be run. She would grow quiet, distant when I corrected something small or raised my voice a little too loudly. Maybe without any indication of something being wrong at all, she would begin to stare off without warning into the distance, visible out of the passenger window, and she would sigh, never telling me what exactly was bothering her as she mentally removed herself from the moments and physical spaces that we shared.

Her silence in those imagined scenarios and in this moment under my microscope unsettled me all the more as I slipped into my own off-track trains of thought about pleading with her for even a clue or a morsel to understand her innermost workings. I realized that it was possible that the artist who had made the images for the game had made a mistake. There could be only nine differences. There could be one missing. Maybe they leave one out so you contort yourself as I have and download the game to conquer your own inadequacy. This angered me to think about. I had wasted so much time in pursuit of the tenth difference, and it might not even exist at all.

I was no closer to finding this tenth difference between the two. Where the gutter once stood, separating the two images with the multitudes of a lifetime contained in mere pixels of blank separation, only questions abounded. The two images could have been placed one atop the other for all it mattered to my perception. For all intents and purposes, they were the same images. She was the same woman in the same exact moment and the exact space, frozen in time before my eyes. That gutter that contained the vast multitudinous potentials of the universe faded into nothing. The images were one and the same.

Viewed in this way, she was at once both one and the same, while in the same instant two distinct beings living two distinct lives. The chasm contained a variety of lifetimes, but not a variation in essence. Rather than being juxtaposed against her past self, contained in that chasm was the very same woman in two parallel lives, differing not in substance, but in minor shifts in the world around her. As much as I had hoped to find a simple difference like a wedding ring on her left ring finger, even a difference in marital status would have changed very little about her.

The fractal nature of human life became plain to me in that instant. With as much as we attempt to channel the long course of minor human events around us, try to make perfect choices about our future, down to the minor objects that we buy and collect, it is all meaningless to the intrinsic nature of who we are. Viewed in this way, through a series of lenses, placed one atop the other across an infinite series of planes of existence, vagaries disappear along with the inconsequential differences between the possibilities of human life. She is who she is. I am who I am.

With this notion, the idea of spending any further time spying out a tenth difference vanished from my mind as I clicked the stationary ‘X’ that had hovered in the upper right-hand corner this entire time. It was time to move on with my life. And her with hers.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Ron Arbuckle lives in Oklahoma. He is the author of the novel, A Matter of Design. His writing is published or forthcoming in Expat Press, Blood+Honey, Hawkeye, GONZOID, Trash Cat Lit, Citywide Lunch, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, BULL, Hidden Peak Press, Plague Circus Press, Some Words, serious-lit, La Rotonde & The Gorko Gazette.