Maybe in another life I’ve moved out west to pan the proverbial gold that is a music career in the “City of Angels”. Maybe I’m fit and happy, with sleek foreign friends who have funny names and accents. Maybe we all drink espresso mid-morning, and talk crap about anything we come into contact with, real euro-trash style. I could be playing in a pop band right now, some gorgeously tan girl waiting for me just off stage left, smiling shyly. I had this dream about a me that wasn’t me. He was just like I am, except he was everything else and not much at all. Actually, we didn’t have a lot to talk about. Actually, I’m pretty sure that somewhere he exists. Actually, I’m not completely sure it was a dream.
At my acupuncturist’s office, I read about parallel universes in Popular Science magazine. Dr. Robert scoffs while telling me the Buddhists had known it all along and I don’t doubt him for a second. Then he lies me down on the couch and rearranges my body. “Three needles” he tells me “that’s all you need”. He opens my heart charka and it burns a hell of a lot. My shirt has a new hole in it now, and he goes to get some Neosporin for what will soon be a pretty little wound on my chest. I start counting my breaths– in and out, 1, in and out, 2, etc. In the next room, his assistant, Michael, practices changing into different animals and moves things with out touching them at all. I know this because the needles tell me so. They’ve got so many answers if you just ask the right questions, if you let your body move out to the tips, let it taste the static metal tinted fresh air. I drift off into a faux-meditation, a sort of mental ebb and flow, bobbing along to the cheesy new age Shakuhatchi recordings. My arms fold quietly over my stomach.
Once, I worked in this office, mixing herbs. I was impressed when I learned that the Chinese use ground cockroaches and coral to dissolve tumors. “It tastes terrible, so you have to put a lot of licorice in” Dr. Robert told me, “but be careful, licorice really gets ladies going, if you know what I mean.” In my experience, it doesn’t.
I worked mixing herbs around the same time that my grandmother was dying of colon cancer. She was living with us in Florida because Colorado was “too damn cold”. Florida (unfortunately, since I love the winter) is never “too damn cold,” but it rains a lot, so we still have something to complain about. Every week while my grandmother lived with us, I would stay home from high school and watch this skeleton that had once bore my mother struggling to open tea bags for our afternoon sun tea. It was depressing but also sort of beautiful.
I used to take my grandmother on long walks in the afternoon. There were many reasons why we did this, but the main two were: 1, my grandmother wanted to work on her tan, and 2, it was often beautiful outside. On one of these walks, I almost pushed my grandmother’s wheel chair in front of a Ford F-350 truck because it felt like she would suffer less in death by three-ton squashing then by slowly becoming a living corpse. This was just after she had insisted we turn back towards home because a black cat had crossed our path. My grandmother was very superstitious.
I’ve kind of come back to reality, but I’m no longer in the doctor’s office. I am, in fact, now driving my car. It is now late, late, late at night and the sky is that sort of pale grey-black cloudy tropical color, which is oppressive and always feels like morning but never actually is. I’m on a highway in the middle of the Everglades (a sweet smelling swampy river which covers most of south Florida and where, as a child, I watched an alligator crush a boy just a little bit older then I was with his mousetrap quick jaws). All of a sudden I am scared. I’ve killed people tonight, and not just one. I’ve done horrible things to their bodies as they died. The police are coming, fast. They’re practically on my heels. I don’t know this for a fact, but I can feel it in my gut—it’s like that other me I dreamed about is whispering it in my ear. I’m tired as hell. It’s way fucking late.
I start toying with the idea of pulling over and letting fate decide my future. The cops will most definitely get me, and then quickly lock me up in seclusion on death row. I’ll be lonely and unhappy for the rest of my life, but I’ll be fed, I’ll be clothed, and I’ll be able to see my parents and little sister. The other available option is I can keep driving. I’ll be alone for a while, but at least there is possibility— the chance I’ll make it to Canada, or Alaska, or something. That would mean I could have a future of love affairs and happiness, a future of trying to forget what I’ve done—which right now I don’t even remember. I start to realize that I’m leaning towards giving up and it terrifies me that I’m losing faith in my own future. It terrifies me that I have so little trust in my ability to provide me with simple human happiness. I’m scared because right then, it seems so overwhelmingly hard, so pointless, and so unnecessary to live. Are the rewards really worth all the suffering? At that moment, I’d rather be caged.
I pull over to wait for my future and from the passenger seat, the dream me starts singing one of his songs– “and, despite my best intentions and against your worst inventions / I keep finding myself at family interventions / and a candle’s just a candle until it’s a bomb / so throw me up that dynamite, I’ve been here too long.” I watch the sun start to rise. It’s orangey pink, and full of fire. “There’s my new life.” I think. “That’s my new sun,” I think. And, all of a sudden it very much is.
