I open my eyes and I am in a very dark space, but bright, artificial lights keep on rushing past me in quick, fluid movements which are seemingly perfectly timed with the music that also occupies so much of the small space I find myself in. I am in the backseat of my best friend's car. She and her boyfriend are in the front, passing a pipe back and forth. The pipe's name is Mawu. The car's name is Falcore. It is the summer of 2010, and I am eighteen years old. This is the summer of love and of light and of wings, of peach tea and cigarettes, of acid trips and Literature of Film, of Elmwood park and trees whispering all their darkest secrets for anyone to hear. I listen, and I understand, and I fall in love. With halos of light and with arms and with legs and with Vonnegut and with Eliot and with blue and with yellow and with all of this, whatever it is, and I am lying down in the backseat of my best friend's car feeling pleasantly elevated and warm and this is a moment where it all just consumes me and the flame of my Self is briefly extinguished and I float, and I observe, and I dream, and there is no response but to cry and to thank God thank love thank light thank time for giving me this, for giving me All and One and please let me hold on a little longer-
-I am in the park behind the school and I am wrapping my arms around a tree, it is several months later and I have forgotten how to breathe. My knees give out beneath me and so I sink, and sink, and sink. Into the dirt and the roots and the stories of the soil, there are too many. Too much. I want nothing more than just to sleep and to avoid. Falling in love is an invitation to unfathomable pain, and it sits in your chest in your heart and in your lungs and it can stay there for years, unmovable, unchanging. There are tiny explosions in my veins when I hear You speak, the words break against my skin and shatter like glass. Everything is fragile, I think, I know that now.-
-I roll over in a bed that is not my own, and there is a beautiful girl lying next to me, sleeping with the sweetest small smile on her lips and I want to taste them more than I've ever wanted to taste anything in my life. I am sixteen and shy and nebulous and void. She is powerful and poetic and composed of opal light. Our fingertips are so close to touching. I can feel the movement of the air in her lungs. The sound of my pounding heartbeat threatens to overpower everything. Soon it will clap like thunder. Soon it will shake the earth. She will wake up and hold on to me for safety and for warmth and I will bury my face in her golden hair and live there for a hundred years. I will build a lighthouse. I will signal home. Something will hear me, pull me back, and pour me into the cosmic womb once more. Wake up. Start over.-
-I am born in Okinawa, Japan. It is August 1991. They don't tell you before you're born that from here on out you will have to spend every waking moment making choices. It never stops and it never gets any easier. To breathe or to turn blue? I try to crawl back into the void, but they won't let me. They try very hard to keep both me and my mother alive, and I guess for that I am grateful. She and I are really still strangers, but she has given me life, form, shape, color, sound, motion, everything swirls and screams and pierces and tears and cradles and comforts and sings and lullabies.-
-I am looking into Her eyes and she says "Welcome to Earth, child. This is your home. It is hot and cold and lovely and gruesome. Isn't it wonderful? To be alive?" I look at Her and I do not know where or when I am. There are no hints anywhere. There is nothing, everywhere. And I realize that She is me and I am Her and this is just a mirror, this is nowhere. She exists between me and a door to another place, apparently one which I am not meant to be inside yet. I tell Her that I did not ask to be born. I ask Her who makes these choices, who decides these things. She smiles and says "You are in control of your own machine." I tell her that there is a problem, faulty mechanics, I've lost control. Did I ever really possess it? I have no idea whether I am eight or eighteen or eighty or eight hundred years old. Nobody can change what has already happened, but anybody can alter what has yet to take place. Where and when am I? Where and when can I go? She speaks, but her voice is muted, the veil has been returned. I disappear, and so, of course, does She. We fuse together and I wake up in Omaha, Nebraska, it is 2014 and I've just had the strangest dream. There was Nothingness and the sound of infant screams while my own reflection spoke to me of birth and of machines. I grab a pen and scribble something down before I can forget, something the Dream must have wanted to tell me. And the Dream says: "There is no such thing as good or evil or here or there. Time does not mean a thing. There is no why. There are only memories, light, sound, colors, and motion. You were born. You exist. Understand. Please, please, please understand."
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