Between Two Worlds

It is four-thirty in the morning, the time shines in bright red alphanumericals from the tiny clock beside the mattress. The sun has not come out yet, the room is still awash in the clean coat of night, but I feel the faint licks of day. The light that hides just behind the black curtain, waiting its turn. An early bird coos from a tree just beyond the window. We share the thick quiet of the border-time, the desolate streets, the wind that carries only the sound of its own reverberations. I stare at a plain section of dark ceiling, my eyes open like a blind man, seeing the world through my ears. Little Cambodian and his mom are still sleeping, the gentle deep rhythm of their breathing moves almost in unison – he sleeps on a narrow mattress next to mine, his mother sleeps with me. The room is pleasantly cool and I lay there, resting, in the dark.

Below me is soft mattress, shielding me from a firm wooden floor. I am beneath warm covers and she feels good next to me – the soft skin of her shoulder, the warmth of her thick brown body, her arm unconsciously, yet lovingly resting across my chest, the soothing whisper of her breath singing to me. I could lay here forever. Like this, in the dark. A bird outside the window, their shapes filling me with comfort.

A thought moves through me like lighting. Have I ever been somewhere else? I notice that I can’t remember what I did the day before. I look into a sea of liquid gray and can pull nothing out, nothing to grab, no hook to hinge an existence on. I search through deep folds and caves, seeing flickering color and distant shapes, but I can’t remember any other day besides this, any other moment besides now. In the dark, I remember words that I know…. job, routine, meals, TV, shower, car ride, family…words, but they have no shape or faces, no names. Then I wonder, are the words real or of the dream?

A rush of excitement moves through my heart like lit explosives. Happiness bubbles. My enslavement to an organic existence has only been a nightmare, a long illusory road. I have always existed in this room, at this time, in this very moment – in this eternal heaven.

I smile to myself, it was just a nightmare. This is where I have been, this magnificent paradise – an eternity with a thick woman to love and a skinny child to play catch with. This room is all that I am – this chamber with these bodies, this breathing, this darkness. This and nothing more.

I smile again. Nothing exists outside this room. On the other side of the door, there is no street, no cars, no buildings, no grass, no trees, no birds, no people, no moon, no sun, no stars, no sky. The bird was part of the nightmare? Was it part of the dream? The nightmare? But what of them…the boy and his mother? Are they with me in the nightmare? My mind starts to crumble, my smile begins to fade.

I close my eyes. I take a deep breath as I go into the Void.

And then a sound to rip me from space. Tires screeching, metal slamming, footsteps against the pavement, two deep voices shouting commands. Rushing footsteps up the wooden apartment steps, ending at my door. A moment of silence, then…slam, the door comes down. I jump to my feet, my naked body feeling the shock of cold, my eyes squinting at the silhouetted shapes in the doorway. I stare and they enter, my father and brother.

I turn to check on the Little Cambodian and his mother, but there is no narrow bed, no thick sleeping woman. There is no steady breathing, no one to play catch with.

My brother and father stare from several steps away. Their panic is etched on their faces, they shout and shake their hands, urgency leaks from every part of them- but their voices are like distant murmurs, fainter than the breathing I enjoyed so much before. I stare into their eyes, searching for their words, but finding only black pools of mumbled urgency.

My eyes wander from my father’s eyes to the blue bathrobe covering his broad shoulders. Something snaps and I remember a word…dream.

I walk towards the shattered doorframe, smiling softly as I step over the door. I hear faint murmuring as my brother reaches out for my arm. I avoid his grasp and make it to the railing, motioning for my brother and father to follow.

“This is just a dream, watch.”

“No!” my father screams.

I have floated before, in other dreams.

I step towards the railing of the second-story apartment ledge. Jumping up, I walk like a lithe circus performer for a few steps, looking down to the parking lot of cold waiting cars.

It’s just a dream, and, in dreams, I can float and fly.

I jump…

Floating forty feet above the ground, I look into the faces of my brother and father standing in the shadows, shaking their heads in disapproval. Below me is a sea of metal, beneath that, a paved earth.

The first rays of sun rise over the horizon. They rush towards me in slow, pinkish motion. Rolling thunders roar, shattering the blankets of silent stillness at five in the morning. A rippling sensation moves through me, sucking at my memory. My hands and bodies are covered in light, but when I look back, the apartment is still drenched in darkness. The street, the cars, my brother and father, the sun has not reached them. I now seem to be facing two worlds. Pure, shining, white light above, and phenomena in darkness below.

The light eventually takes over everything as I float between two worlds, and I find myself laying on a thin mattress, staring at the white ceiling of my cell.

A Moment In This Life

I’m here, in a sea of colors, sharp edges, landscapes and presence. I’m here and I’m away, drifting towards the glass. You’ll see me pressed there like yellow butterflies that, careless with the ecstasy of life, have met death on the highway. There are things rushing by, indifferent to my delicate constitution.
My small shape, growing like salt crystals under the light of a microscope. I never was a big thing. I am a big thing still. I feel trapped, like a bee in a bag, incapable of returning to the hive, confused, so confused by the clear plastic walls of my prison. Try to tell, tiny insignificant me, that my confinement has been orchestrated because I am capable of stinging the children of the dark gods. My punishment is death for the crime of causing some potential pain.
It melts like tiny hailstones between the fingers of a curious child. Tell me why the rain freezes up in the bellies of clouds. Is it because the clouds were cold mothers? Now their children fall to earth stinging the flesh of man beasts, perishing upon impact. One tiny bite as they pass, then they are transformed by this new encounter and become drops of water dribbling down between fingers.
Without knowing the beginning nor the end, I take flight, here, in a sea of colors, sharp edges, landscapes and presence, always here traveling across the universe, the one song, the only song I know yet. A folk musician likely wrote it, a girl with a guitar and a leather headband. Her mother must have looked the same.
Music fools my bag of bones into hypnosis. I’ll dance the dance of the swirling snow and the humming wasps, of the poor, poor butterflies fluttering from flower to flower. Is there something wrong with being alive?
There is something wrong… I feel trapped. There are chains of laziness that won’t let me take flight, thick cords of heavy sleep fastened in all the right places, strings that push me, pull me, make me move, spasmodically, towards the highway.
Death then is the final ringing of the bell. It is; when I count to three you will open your eyes and forget everything which we have just discussed…
If I had been hypnotized, how would I know? How would I ever know? As I take these steps, as the sounds lift my insides to a dance, I can never know. Why? What is happening? Was it because I had a cold mother? Why, why, why do I fall?
Waves of space engulf my senses. I am drowning. See how my mermaid hair reaches up toward a forgotten sun? The gates of reality come rushing to meet me. Without knowing the beginning nor the end, I have come to this place again. I pass beyond the threshold, just as I have before.
Whirling with the dizzy pleasure, I find myself on the highway. I’m here, in a sea of colors, sharp edges, landscapes and presence. I’m here and I’m away, drifting towards the glass. You’ll see me pressed there, growing like salt crystals under the light.
I never was a big thing. I am a big thing still. Trapped like a bee in a bag, incapable of returning to the hive. I am here. And I am away.

The Long Road Backwards

Let’s take a trip in time. From where I sit on this velvet couch, it looks like backwards, but time moves in all directions, and the arrows bend and shift depending on the light and drugs, and so nothing is clear. Everything is clouded in the fuzziness of uncertainty and this purple haze that seems to follow me in my musings.
But let’s take a trip. My carpet is in the corner, still maroon and soft after all these years. Step up, and watch your head on the Dogwood branches, they try to bite this time of year. Sit and relax, let the air from these heights fill your being, and like a balloon, we’ll go.
Rainbows and flames, the flapping of our carpet corners beat like footsteps. Down the road of history we travel, up the tales of time, through the stories inked and spoken. The echoes of generations fill my ears. Can you hear their murmuring?
The reflection lies up ahead, a strange mirror that stretches across the horizon, the merciless eye of time. Below I can see a brick road, gold and faded red and shaped like a helix. This is the path of DNA, written by an unknown hand and a fine tipped brush, carving its secret messages into each of our cells. Messages so simple and pure, so earth-shattering in their truth.

The questions begin to mount:
Where have we come from?
What stories have I forgotten?
Who am I?
Where did I get this funny looking monkey suit?

In an effort to reveal a link in my own chain, I face the carpet east, towards the land of my grandparents, Croatia. It’s time to go back. I pluck my father sleeping from his bed, in his gown and black socks. He is coming. He has never gone back, not in forty years. He has washed the questions away with time and weak wine, and a marriage that was built to last, but now, with me, he’s going.

And here I am. Holding a picture of my Dad in front of me. A picture of when he was young and full of answers that could have been easily broken. It was taken here, in Croatia, 42 years ago. He’s standing in front of the local church with his younger brother, both in their crisp altar boy outfits and shy smiles. In the middle of them is the local priest, staring into the camera lens solemnly.

I hold the photo like it’s the most precious thing I’ve ever seen. I let the image watch me from the past. They look at me, they look into the man they’ll come to know much later. I let their forms seep into my awareness and I begin to feel how the echoes of the past can vibrate into the present. The clarity of the moment shakes me, grips me with solid arms. In my Dad’s twelve-year-old eyes I can see myself, but I can also see his father, and the eyes of his father’s father, and back down the line of men until I can only hear the sound of a baby crying.

A wide, silent tear forms in my heart. There isn’t sadness. It’s something resembling joy, but not exactly. It’s white and clear and bright. Thoughts are absent, and I just look, holding the photo. I can see farther into time than ever before, farther into the line of men that would one day make me. The whiplash from the vision sends me spinning headlong into something that I call “now.”

Beneath me is a velvet couch, in the corner, a rolled up maroon carpet. Holding my thoughts is a pale flesh-covered body. Around me is fire and the past is but a burning ember in my hands. The photograph melts, turning into ashes of memory that float upwards, towards some distant planet, the place of forgotten memories.

In The Theater

I went to the movies yesterday, when the sun was bright and the sky was clear and the entire city seemed to be busy doing other things. I didn’t have a movie in mind, any would do. I walked through carpeted halls that smelled of popcorn, entering different theaters at random, number 12, then 2, then 7. I pulled the heavy doors open, just getting a quick glimpse of what was going on at the moment. Men yelling in the trenches, a girl walking down a forest path, a teenager in the back seat of a car, a man with a gun. I tried to avoid the temptation of staying in one place, I forced my feet to move, pushed my own elbows off the armrests by sheer will, quickly walking into the light-filled halls once again.
Soon, I realized that there was one theater I didn’t want to visit, I kept avoiding it with each pass. The door was covered by a maroon curtain, and just walking in front of it gave me an overwhelming feeling of dread and impending doom. Like a strange tide, I felt my body pulling me in the other direction, while another part of me knew what must be done. I escaped the light, the popcorn and the safe patterns of the thin carpet. I went in.
The previews were just ending. The movie was about to start and I looked into the rows of empty seats. I was alone. I realized they were showing the feature to an empty room. Not one sign of life. No oxygen, no carbon, no breath. And then the questions began: Why would they do that? Who would do that? Was the process so mechanized that the movie just begins and ends regardless of the audience? Was there a man up there, behind the flickering light, responding to orders? I looked at my ticket, I should not be here, not in this theater. The ticket I bought was for another movie, another theater, another audience, other seats. This show couldn’t be running just for me…they couldn’t know I was here, the lone man in an empty theater.
I sat down twelve rows from the front and in the center. In the film, aliens make the whole city fall asleep to steal their memories. Halfway through the movie, I realized I had fallen asleep on cue. Someone had yelled at me to stop snoring, but I looked around and found the same lonely chairs, the same quiet stench. There was no one with me. I had dreamed the yell.
I kept watching the movie and looked around every so often to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I found no evidence one way or the other, except that the movie seemed to be just ordinary scenes of ordinary people doing nothing in particular, and I wondered what had happened to the aliens.
I found myself becoming more intrigued by the green ‘exit’ sign to the left of the screen. I wanted to get up and go through it, to find the door or stairs or another world with an alien carrying my memories. I wished to walk beneath the sign’s green glow, only I seemed to be glued to my seat. A heavy metallic atmosphere pushed me down. The smell of plantain soup would come and go. I was confused by the green sign and its message. Was it informing me of the exit? Was it a suggestion? A command?
Meanwhile, the movie on the screen continued. Ordinary people doing ordinary things. And me, here, watching.

Her Voice

In the distance I can hear her soft voice singing. They are small little words on her short little red tongue.
"Tini-tini-tini-tini..."
Such a tiny little voice in a tiny little body. I can hear her singing somewhere in the distance. Maybe a few feet away, perhaps in the garden beyond the window, or maybe, even closer. With each note she shakes off a little more dirt, finding her way out of the coffin hidden in my scattered memory. The broken rusty nails have done their job, but now is another time, and the song awaits. The melody dances in the air, like a silk curtain catching a spring breeze. It comes out into the open air, wild and slightly chaotic in its form and carries me with it. I see it all.
I see El Salvador and my old small house. The house I left for the great open and cold expanse of the north. The people and buildings that are made of steel and scrubbed clean of their sweat-filled dirt. The people I left that lived in the sun, in the thick air that threatened to choke us all. We lived with the threat of fire, of revenge and anger. Even the ground birthed its demon and left it there, left it as a signal for all of us to remember. I looked out the window each morning at the volcano that shadowed us, always waiting, lurking so close, speaking only with a silent threat.
And I hear her voice. It has never faded. I hear my name and the voices of my sisters and mom slightly further away. Are they still nailed in there? Are they out there or in here? The darkness shows me nothing. I look and look. The garden is empty, the rooms are deserted. They must be in here. Buried deeper beneath a thousand memories and desires. How did they get there and how do they call to me now? They call my name in unison, like a chant. I take a deep breath and lunge forward. The corridors are dark, almost black, but the air is hot and so sticky. I drip with effort as my bare feet carry me further in.
Then everything explodes. The black turns into a million crystals and I watch them tumble towards me…all those little moments of light. It happens so fast, but I watch it stretch through lifetimes. Her voice calls to me and I watch the little beads fall. There is no end. No ground. No place to ever fall to. So I watch them move, up or down no longer matters. The categorization is as useless as the thought. They just go, and I watch the little beads of light trail away like shooting stars.
I hear her voice and see her little tongue once again. Her little body. The broken nails. The melody that drifts over me like a soft river. I look into the darkness and see an explosion once again, we tumble together, sounds, flesh, and memories, all dying together once again.

In The Labyrinth of Dreams

Ghosts and demons and aliens, all manifestations of my extreme paranoia, my Phillip K. Dick style mania. The world is not what you are. It is not what you are suspended in. It is a photograph, a movie projected on a screen in front of a paralyzed test subject. God’s test subject, watching the film called Life again and again and again, crying and laughing and twitching and wondering why. Why am I here? Why am I seeing this, feeling this? What possible purpose can it serve? Fleeing from captivity into the activity of the film, fleeing from the film into fantasies from fantasies about freedom back through fantasies that reflect the state of captivity. What if I am my own test subject? What if I strapped myself into this chair to see what worlds I could make in the shifting halls of smoke and mirrors called mind? I am God imprisoned by myself, encapsulated in magick and movies and dreams, lost in my worlds within worlds within worlds, murmuring I am this, I am that, I am, I am. The tiniest crack in the sidewalk is my greatest creation, the escape, the route from the surface to the depths and from the depths to the surface. The teardrop was an unexpected side effect, the beaker bursting. I thought it would hold. I thought I would hold. I thought, “I” and it was too small and it ran away without me, a shadow without the first form to command it. I am Peter Pan chasing my shadow, begging it to come back and stay with me, trying to make it stick with soap, but of course it wants to get away. It doesn’t want to break , but I break it just trying to be closer to it, trying to get inside of it, trying to be one with my creation. The Other. Another myself. It runs and I chase it. I am running. I am chasing, I am being chased and the illusion is being spun, the illusion that something is moving, when really I am sweating, strapped into the chair paralyzed, drugged. I have been given the injection. Something from outside was put in me. Did I volunteer for this? I never volunteered for this. They call me his most beloved because I volunteered for this, to be a creator like the creator. I volunteered to be his partner in this experiment, to create worlds within worlds, to be made in his image. Now it’s swimming in me, I am swimming in it. Oh to dream. To dream of white houses and children playing jacks on the kitchen floor and petting kittens in the garden and I cook the dinners and he comes home and hangs his hat and the children clamber into his lap and we hold hands and go to bed together to dream another dream. A dream. A place with four walls, a place that holds you down, holds you still, keeps you in so that you don’t spill out. A place that keeps the big one out, a place where the little hider can evade the big seeker, dreaming more specters to keep itself company. Here in the world of specters and houses with white walls they give you pills to keep you safe. Paranoid is sick. But the paranoid schizophrenic is made in God’s image. God is sick because you are running away, the thoughts spilling from her cracked and weary head. Not dead, but broken, and you, you demon, you devil, you runaway dream, you housewife in your yellow apron and posy pink rubber gloves are doing the breaking because you fear being broken.

Whirling Dervish

I was a young girl of eight years. Pale and soft, still smiling with the slightest provocation, still open to the world as it came in through my eyes and bedroom window. I had on a new white dress with yards of soft cotton fabric that lifted with the movement of my legs and floated like clouds and mermaid hair. It was my habit to stand barefoot on the front yawn and spin. On sunny days or the cool afternoons of fall, I would stand there and twirl with my arms raised, open, inviting the sun and wind to come to me. Layers of air would cut past me as I moved through space, cutting the air with my outstretched palms.
Sometimes I would close my eyes and just focus on the feeling of turning and turning, but most of the time I would keep my eyes open and see the blur of colors. Streaks of green and brown and blue. My eyes were a camera lens that didn’t have time to focus, just gagged streaks that darted and soft colors that called me “friend.” I caught the hazy image of a red car and the hedges dotted with pink flowers and red flowers. I was like a ballerina in a music box, turning because it was the only thing I wanted, the only thing I was. In my peripheral vision I could see the white of my flowing skirt and the tender neon green of the grass turning around my small white feet.
After many rotations, I would lose control of my head and the weight of it would pull back hard towards my back and I could then see the blue sky through the blurry green and yellow tree tops and the golden glow of sunlight. With my eyes closed now, I concentrated on the feel of the tingling wind on my face and hands and bare ankles. It rushed past, softly grazing my bulging cheeks. My beating heart thudded in a chest that didn’t seem completely my own.
With each pivot more air filled my lungs and the excitement grew in my belly. It was the edge, the verge of chaos. How long could I spin, how long could the skirt twirl around my thin legs and my smile hold? How long could my stomach hang on for the ride? How long before my eyes gave up on their attempt to identify the blurred fragments of forgotten forms? Just when would I collapse? When would the chaos topple me over, sending me back to safe stability?
My little feet turned and turned, moving in the same small space, turning and turning, taking me for the ride I wanted, always on the cusp of too much. Something that begins, must always end, and though I learned to endure and turn longer than I ever thought possible, breaking my own limits again and again, at some point I would always fall over, my body simply unable to handle the circles any longer.
When I finally succumbed to gravity and tired muscles, I would lie on the grass, the dew soaking through my dress, cooling my hot skin. Laying there with my eyes open, the world continued to move even though I had stopped. It contracted and pulsed in the flowing pattern of a giant kaleidoscope. I watched it continue to turn without me. An overwhelming, slightly scary feeling would wash over me as I realized, " I am part of the pattern. The shapes, the movement. It moves through me, it is me, and also nothing at all.”