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

Finding Where the Path Begins

Hello, I’m new to WordPress, so I’ll express myself to you, no holds barred, in a few of my favorite song lyrics.

1. “Oh, an incurable humanist you are.” – ‘Loveology’ by Regina Spektor

One definition of a humanist is someone who can never stop caring for human kind. When I turn eighteen in a few months, I plan on having the words Incurable Humanist tattooed on my right forearm to remind myself to always do good unto my fellow (wo)man and pause to consider how my actions will affect others before carrying them out.

2. “I was four plus a ten. I was swinging fast, like a race to be sure.” – ‘Like O, Like H’ by Tegan & Sara

I’m engaged to a man now, but starting around the time I was thirteen, I identified as a lesbian. The summer of my eighth grade year and my freshman year of high school revolved around my girlfriend who was seventeen at the time and, um, ‘flighty’ when it came to relationships. Take all the drama of a teenage girl, multiply it by two, and span it out over a year and a half, and you’ll understand what I mean. Sophomore year didn’t improve with a lukewarm, haphazard affinity for a neo-dyke I met one day in the locker room after gym class (thus continues the trend of 17-year-old girls). If you’ve just met her and she’s already seen you naked and is whipping you with a towel, chances are, there is nowhere else for that relationship to go. I never had sex with her, but I felt objectified. I already had an eating disorder and wore a ton of makeup. Ironically, after not seeing her for a year, the first thing she said to me was, “You’ve gotten chubby!” No, bitch,  I’m healthy, and I’ve stopped wearing makeup. These relationships taught me not to change myself for someone else because then he or she won’t like you for you, he or she will like the more-like-her/him version of you that you’re projecting. If you wait long enough, you’ll find your true match in the least likely place.

3. “You can tell by the red in my eyes & the bruises on my thighs & the knots in my hair & the bathtub full of flies that I’m not right now at all. There I go again, pretending that I’ll fall;  don’t call the doctors ’cause they’ve seen it all before. They’ll say, ‘Just let her crash and burn she’ll learn; the attention just encourages her.'” – ‘Girl Anachronism’ by The Dresden Dolls

I’ve accepted that the label ‘crazy’ has stuck. I don’t really care. I realize I’m just the slightest bit unstable, and I cry at inappropriate times, and sometimes I’m highly irrational, delusional, destructive, etc, but that’s why I’m trying my hardest now to find calm and center myself. It’s not easy in my current environment, but I hope to get there. I can’t afford counseling anymore, so it’s getting a little tricky.

4. “He stumbled into faith and thought, ‘God, this is all there is.'” – ‘Blue Lips’ by Regina Spektor

First my family was agnostic, then we were atheistic, then we were devout Christians. The first was fine by me. I was kid, and I didn’t know other kids were raised to believe in deities. I went to public school, so we didn’t pray and no one talked about religion because we were young and there were other things easier for our young minds to grasp and talk about, like Hot Wheels and Barbies and Pokemon. My dad became a closet atheist when his mother died of pancreatic cancer. I was in the seventh grade, and I don’t remember believing in much at this point either. When I came out in eighth grade as a lesbian, it somehow catapulted me into Christianity, as crazy as that sounds. I think I was just really afraid of offending some force of the universe. I was trying so hard to be a good human. The beginning of sophomore year, my family started going to church with a family whose husband/father worked with my father. My parents really bought into Jesus, and they made me more perfection-obsessed than I’d ever been. They didn’t approve of the neo-dyke girlfriend of sophomore year. She was more of a self-esteem booster than anything. I had an eating disorder, and she constantly called me beautiful. I likely only kept her around because after freshman year girlfriend, I didn’t feel good enough for anyone, so I went to the first woman who showed interest. I feel terrible for that now. I guess she deserved to call me chubby. I’m still very-appearance obsessed, regarding both myself and others. I feel really controlling of my fiance because he lets me control appearance-based things like how he cuts his hair. Those are simple, personal decisions I should be letting him make, but he loves me enough to let me do this. I really hate myself for it. I guess I got off the subject of religion. I strayed from Christianity because I couldn’t stand the anti-gay sentiment of the churches in our community anymore, or how the Bible depicted females as lower than males. At some point, I fell into an obsessive mind set (I have a sort of OCD characterized by repetitive mental patterns rather than repetitive actions) that the universe was a random conglomerate of accidents and life had no meaning whatsoever (a belief system known as nihilism). I know people who rejoice in the nihilistic viewpoint, but I am not one of them. I fell into a very deep depression. I slept for days, missed school, wouldn’t eat, and was verbally abusive to anyone who couldn’t understand me, which, it seems, was everyone besides my gay best friend. He was recently accepted into MENSA (the man is a fucking genius) and could dance philosophical circles around me that kept me from killing myself. This went on for a month before I blocked the thoughts out enough to keep them at bay. During that month, my gay best friend (who had been my gay best friend for years) and I realized we were desperately in love with each other and put aside our gender preferences. We taught each other how to have straight sex, which was hilarious looking back on it, but I was too numb from the depression to find it too particularly funny at the time, and wound up confusing the hell out of our peers because we were two of the most openly homosexual people in school. Needless to say, he’s now my fiancé, and I love him more than anything else in the universe. Eventually, the thought cycles came back, and I found myself in-patient at a psychiatric hospital, locked ward with shot-in-the-butt sedatives and the whole bit (the sedatives were only for the extremely violent girls who hurt the doctors). I met some of the realest, most down-to-earth people there one could ever meet. Being crazy together makes you a lot closer. Now that I’ll have been out for a year come October, I feel it’s time to delve into a new path. My fiancé is a combination of Jewish and Buddhist, but Shamanism really appeals to me. After seeing a documentary on DMT a long while back, I’d yearned to explore planes beyond this one, interacting with spirit guides and seeing the gates where I’ve been reborn countless times. I’ve only tried DMT once, smoked, but instead of breaking through, I became very shaky and dizzy. In the end I ended up sitting on the concrete floor in my fiancé’s workshop, petting his adorable/incredibly obese cat. It’s time I start researching.

5.  “The pictures in his mind arose and began to breathe.” – ‘Blue Lips’ by ReginaSpektor

Another thing factoring into my interest in Shamanism are what I believe to be memories from past lives I’ve relived in dreams and even one waking flashback. I was alive in the 1750’s (I remember bits of the preparations for my wedding, as well as furniture in the rococo style), 1918 (I was a nurse during the Spanish Influenza outbreak), and the 1970’s (when my husband shot me to death). I want to remember just who I was and fully learn how my past lives have affected the one I’m presently in. I think we continue to be reborn because we can’t learn all we need to know in one lifetime. I also want to learn to navigate the spirit planes so that in our next incarnations, my fiancé and I can find each other again (I’m so codependent it’s not even funny). The other day I told him I was scared we wouldn’t find each other again. He told me not to worry because he’ll be waiting for me again in the place we first met, which ironically is the cemetery a few blocks from my home.
There you have it. I’m done rambling. I’m far too inattentive at this point to proofread, so I hope I didn’t mess up too badly. I’m sorry if I did. I’m not sure if I’m a very pathetic person, or just a very honest one.

Love,
Atl Coaxoch

(Or Bri, if you prefer something closer to my real name– Atl Coaxoch is a Nahuatl name I chose for this blog combining the words for Water and Flower-Serpent)