A story of one soul during two lives

Like an unwelcome long-lost lover who presumptuously returns and resumes residence without the tiniest accounting of possible changes in the interim, my alter ego has been pulling harder on the reins. Eager to pick up where he left off, diving into bed without noticing the new aftershave in the medicine cabinet or neckties in the closet. Ignoring the comprehensive remodeling the place has undergone in the past decade and a half, and the half-mad protests of the mistress: I have my own life, there’s no place for you here anymore…

Maybe, just maybe, there’s a good reason for the interstitial amnesia?

Ever stop to consider that? That it might drive me mad to have a whole other avatar hung around my neck, hitchhiking, freeloading on a life which is rightfully mine?

I’m not gonna run around my whole life craving Armani and Porsche and other expensive foreign words, just so some flaky, gaudy hack can get another crack at the Game of Life. I’ve already metamorphed beyond recognition. Just like decadent thirty-year old playboy novelist Victor couldn’t have stood to be faced with cocky, idealistic Victor at fifteen, the whole Victor persona is a stranger to Amanda. Did you think the self-alienation would be mitigated across the veil of death? That’s why we forget, dipshit. No one should have to bear two lifetimes of shame. Fuck you, Victor! You’ve never meant anything but pain.

I’m just you, one spoke to the left on the Wheel, the ghost of your mistakes trying to get it right this time. I’m on your side, yo!

So why do I feel so manipulated when the voice in my head turns husky and uses big words I haven’t learned yet and tells me to gleefully accept our cohabitation, which is variously interpreted by myself and others as schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, or a grisly form of demonic possession? “You may as well just lay back and enjoy it, girl.” Am I a dead man housed in the lithe, firm body of a teenager, or am I that teenager being invaded by the spirit of that man? And the answer comes back: Mu.

Your question is stupid. Both. Neither. Something in between.

You are confused because you think time is a line.

Because of your delusion that there is a you or I. Try a different lens.

Try and see things my way. If we see things your way, it seems that we might fall apart before too long.

Beatles quotes boom through the dimension in my mind, holovision sugue to an alien nostalgia, transporting me to the world to before I was born, buses and cars rumbling noisily and anachronistically down the unbroken artery, and the hallucination brings with it the passion of hopes now dashed, of fears now groundless. The ineluctable flavor of the scene imbues me. I can almost smell the diesel.

That’s too much. Imagine, internal-combustion, energy-hogging, lethal accident-prone rubber-tire continuous surface-only motor cars!

Driving down the road, not in some museum! Yet in a way, the portrait of the impossible is part of a more meaningful home than the deserted rubbish heaps I see superimposed on the same scene in the present tense.

I can taste that day in my belly. Treacherous chilidogs. How could you stand to eat that shit, Victor? And sit here in my mind and tell me we’re the same!

And the old man in my head laughs, and I laugh, and our mirth spans the temporal plane and in the feedback loop that builds, I look across the chasm and know that he and I are one. Jill, the hospital, the Order, Carmen, even Sarah-the bitterness dissolves in the complete merging, as the girl accepts me and I accept the man. A lifetime of memories and lessons to ponder…but then I remember there is no time.

Disoriented in four dimensions, I hum the Order’s prescribed mantra for those moments of inconvenient “crossover vertigo,” which, ironically, I am acquainted with only because I remember it from my prior life as a man; as with a vaccine, the disease contains the remedy:

Where am I? Here.
What time is it? Now.
Who am I? I am the Light made flesh.
What is my duty? To be here and now, in this flesh, and keep my fucking head on straight!

~ )))0((( ~