Like Two Film Negatives Melted Together

I started thinking about my past lives again today. I had this weird dream splice once or twice in which there were sick beds on a fairly modern subway. I feel like they’re two memories from lives in Chicago laid on top of one another, like two film negatives melted together.

Now that I’ve started typing, I feel crazy for talking about this. I feel like I’ve dreamed this all up to keep myself from thinking there is no meaning to anything and landing myself in the hospital again. I’m already crying like an idiot, so I guess I’ll tell you anyway.

These are the human lives I can remember bits and pieces of (there were likely more before them in other forms):

Past Human Life One:
Time Frame: 1750’s
Name: Unknown
Age: Late teens
Race: Of French descent
Speaks: French
Hair Colour: Fiery auburn
Eye Colour: Brown
Status: Once wealthy, now clinging to status
Location: Unknown, possibly New Orleans

What I remember: I’m standing in front of a Rococo style mirror in a stone room lit dimly with candles on one wall. A woman I know to be my mother is packing a trunk with linens. I know they are for my dowry. I feel too young to be married. I don’t like the man I am to marry. I’m scared, but I know my parents wish for me to marry him; we are no longer wealthy and powerful, but he has money and I have a chance yet to keep my social status. I look at my scared, pale face in the mirror. My brown eyes gleam in the candle light, and my hair shines like fire in long curls that fall past my waist. I’m in a chemise and petticoat, waist cinched in by a stomacher, an image of frail femininity. The chemise and petticoat look to be a faded lilac colour; maybe it’s just the lighting. The room feels chilly and dusty, and the fabric shoes on my feet, perhaps slippers of some sort, feel like they’ve been worn thread-bare.

I looked a bit like this in the mirror, but without my hair all done-up:

Past Human Life Two:
Time Frame: 1918
Name: Unknown
Age: Early 20’s
Race: Unknown
Speaks: English
Hair Colour: Unknown
Eye Colour: Unknown
Status: Unknown
Location: Chicago, Illinois

What I remember: I often have nightmares regarding the Spanish Influenza. I see a building full of sick beds, sheets over top of them like tents (I didn’t know before my nightmares that people used to do this because they thought it stopped the spread of disease). Decaying bodies crawl out of mass graves and fill the building. They tell me I could have done more to save them and it was all my fault that they died (I think I was a nurse). I have this dream all the time. I remember teetering just on the verge of sleep one night and dreaming of a sanatorium washroom. It was cement with a cement tub built out from the wall with grimy metal fixtures. All I could think was how scared I was to be there and how I was going to die soon. I remember another dream in which I was lying in one of the sick beds with the sheet tent over top of it. I guess I finally caught the flu and died.

1918 Spanish Influenza Victims in Chicago:

Past Human Life Three:
Time Frame: 1970’s
Name: Unknown
Age: Unknown
Race: Unknown
Speaks: English
Hair Colour: Fiery auburn
Eye Colour: Brown
Status: Recently down on her luck
Location: Arizona

What I remember: This one wasn’t a dream, but a waking flashback. I see glimpses of an apartment, empty besides the damask curtains. I’m closing the door for the last time. The next thing I comprehend is standing outside a mobile home on the edge of a desert. I’m wearing a green cotton scarf tied around my neck and carrying a tan jacket edged with fringe. An angry man, my husband, is advancing at me from the trailer. I hear the screen door smack shut against the frame. There are children’s toys covered in the red desert dust near the trailer. I’m scared more for my children than for myself. “I told you this is all we would have left!” the man screams. I can smell whiskey on his breath and clinging to his bristly moustache. When I come to in my own home and my own life, my hand is pressed to a burning pain in the right side of my abdomen where I fear there is a hole, and the smell of sun-baked leather car interior lingers in my nostrils and makes me want to vomit.

I feel like the dream I have where there are sickbeds in the subway is a combination of memories of Chicago from my last two past lives. Maybe I travelled a lot in the seventies. I don’t know. My thoughts have stopped being cohesive. I feel like a freak, but I can’t crawl into a corner and sulk with myself for the rest of the day because I need to eat a very early dinner and go to corps rehearsals. There are parades to perform in on Saturday and Sunday, and we look like shit. Maybe I should bring a blowgun and shoot my corps with sedating darts so they stop jumping around and shouting long enough to pull these performances out of their asses. I’m sorry I’m so bitter; it’s been a long week. I really, truly love each and every one of them like my sisters, but that creates the problem that they can’t take me seriously in a position of authority, so I have to be the mean one, then I have to apologize because I can’t stand being the mean one, then it starts all over again.

-Atl Coaxoch

Lollapalooza and Other Madness

I’m all registered for my senior year of high school now. I’m hoping it’s slightly less eventful than last year, and I won’t be spending a week of it, er, ‘institutionalized’. I’m meditating for better mental health this time around. 🙂

I had the wonderful opportunity of attending Lollapalooza, all-expense-paid, in Chicago yesterday with my lovely cousin and aunt. We saw ten different bands, including Florence + The Machine, who are my cousin’s favourite, and we saw The Jezabels walking down Michigan Avenue while at Panera Bread for breakfast. I had a blast. My cousin was a bit uncomfortable with all the half naked college kids toking to their favorite alternative bands, which I found funny. I feel like I should drop him off with my friends in the Main Street apartments for a few hours to desensitize him to soft drug use. Maybe he wouldn’t chastise me any more (ahahaha, yeah right). I really enjoyed Nadastrom (I’d never heard them before) and was bummed I missed out on Of Monsters and Men, but they played at the same time as Florence.

I love music, but I’ve dropped out of choir for this year. My director is a distasteful woman who killed any shred of self-esteem I’d managed to cling to. I’m hoping to find a way to still take vocal jazz instruction this year, and I’ll still have my fill of music between band and flag corps (I’m a corps captain this year~).

I’ve talked to my fiancé about the both of us going for all three days of Lolla next year, considering I’ll be moving to Chicago for college, hopefully at Roosevelt, which is right across from Grant Park where it takes place.
He informed me that he bought us tickets to see Amanda Palmer at the Metro in November for our anniversary and that his father now knows we’re engaged. I wasn’t expecting the second one. I’ve been seventeen for five months, and he’s one month short of seventeen. We’ve been engaged for 9 months. We didn’t want our parents to separate us, thinking we were too young, so we kept it a secret. Mom thinks my engagement ring is a very fancy sort of promise ring. I wouldn’t have gotten engaged to just any guy or girl I’d dated this young, but my fiancé and I had already been best friends for years. We used to sleep over at each others’ houses, and it was a brother-sister sort of relationship before the hospital. He kept me alive, and I’m forever grateful.
I was pleasantly surprised that his father approved, considering he’s generally very old-fashioned and seems to think we can’t grasp the consequences of our actions most of the time. I can get along with him well enough, it’s just a bit difficult.
I honestly wish I could tell my own parents with the same outcome.

I feel like I really only rambled today.

-Atl Coaxoch