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
From Dust to Light 