TRANSCRIPT:
I don't know if I can tell you this: that there's something sinister waiting to happen. It's a rattlesnake beneath the floorboards type of feeling. A falling to your death just before you wake up because you've been dreaming type of feeling.
Do you believe in past lives because I never have, but if I did, I'd like to make them up for myself the way I make up the meaning of this whole universe, just because I know there isn't going to be a big reveal at the end or at any point, and nobody is going to let me in on the secret.
In one past life, I'm sitting on a porch and the evening is humid, I'm looking out over a creek, hearing but not listening to a cacophony of crickets and insects' monotonous drone, and splashing. I think I'm somewhere in the dustbowl I've read about in all the books about the American Dream. Or the shattering of that Dream. Or the illusion of that Dream. Or a dream of a Dream. But in this dream, or past life, there are two boys throwing punches at each other and they are in the water.
On one side of the creek, there's a pile of clothes. I know that there's a pistol hidden in it. On the other side of the creek, there's only warm darkness, hot night.
Another life now. I am a we. There's a you and a me, but he isn't my you and I can't be his me, or her- we are just somebodys. We are trying to find out what our insides look like using only words. His handwriting is messy, messier than mine is in this life. I mistake his scribbled hearts for small butterflies tacked to the end of a message he penned in a card. Anniversary. Valentines. Birthday.
It's another life. A harvest moon means something in this life. A heartbeat like an insect hitting the window pane. Again. Again. Again.
I'm in a car taking a moonlit drive with Jim Morisson. He's feeding me pieces of heaven. We are midnight heroes. This is another life entirely. But he bites his fingernails, and above his bed is a ceiling fan that whines like a dog in pain, and I hate myself in this life.
The mornings are ugly and my lips look like something I've fallen on. I am cold all the time. I am not introspective, and I do not know why I want to end my life, but I do, so it doesn't last long.
Next life, I chew the inside of my cheek when I am angry or nervous, or both, which is often, and in this life a man is yelling at me in Japanese but I know what he is telling me- you are not worthy. I want to tell him- yes I am- but I do not lift my eyes.
I think I made a long life in Japan but never spoke back. It wasn't the right time, not the right life. But this one, this could be the one.
I'm missing three fingers. I'm probably going to lose half of my nose. My skin is turning to the colour of chrome, it glows amongst all the white. I'm at the top of the world. I made it to the top of the highest mountain in the world.
We may not make it back down alive, but we got here, and this is a feeling I want to package, to put away in a bottle or small box and bring back with me to this real life.
But that was another life, that never happened, forever ago, never ago, and there were many and there were none and I was so special in some and so insignificant in others. See- it doesn't really matter. You can say it's a dream- you can take that pistol out and shoot a bird, you can let the warm dark swallow you, you can put your hands into his chest, you can take your last breath in a dimly lit bathroom, you can say nothing, you can say everything, you can be brilliant, or you can be worthless, but in the end it means exactly the same thing.