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Keith and I divvied up old CD wallets yesterday containing backup CD-Rs from last millennium.

To make a long story short, I found documents I:

- Have no recollection of writing
- Had to read as objectively and as critically as a third party stranger
- Was somewhat impressed by
- Was definitely mystified by and had a hard time relating to

For instance, this little untitled gem I've decided to nickname “DID, Unreconciled.” Which is really just a BS pretentious placeholder until I decide whether it's actually worth giving a permanent name.

DID, Unreconciled
“if there is some confusion, who's to blame?”
… circa 1998 …

And here we are, full circle again. Your entire life is chasing after this, running away from this, dreaming of this, trying to block this out of your memory. This steel-grey sky and the bare trees. You don't even have a name for it. You never even knew how to describe it to another human being.

But it knows what it is. It's almost like another entity, all itself, that you're bound to for life, to keep its secrets.

I think it is you, darlin, and that's really why you can't ever face it. Your entire life spent running away from the beginning, from the inevitable. The floor of this damned room is cold, you're cold, and that damned sky outside is cold. And your mother is out in that city, working like a slave, with her bad back and her sore feet, and everybody knows how to get on with life except for you. Lying here in the dark and silence. Getting up only to go in the other room and look in the mirror and see your face looking more like mama than mama herself. Wide cheekbones. Sunken eyes. Hair every which direction. Your Indian heritage.

You're not going to see them for a long, long time. That's all right. I can wait. I can wait.

“They're not like us,” she says to me, one afternoon, foreboding and grey outside. High up in my room on the third floor, it seems like you could forget the rest of the world existed below if you wanted. “They don't live in the beautiful sadness that we do. Their fake reality is their prison that they've made for themselves. And if we can wait a little longer, just a little while longer, we will get our rewards.” Her bony fingers close around mine. Cold and shaky. She smiles softly. Trust me.

Everything is so bright, even when it's dark. I sit at my desk and close my eyes and the stories come flowing onto the paper. I play music through my headphones. Yes, this is being haunted, but what else do I have? Everything is so clear, it makes so much sense. Write it down. Try to write it down. I write about everybody but myself; it seems I can't make any sense of my own life. Yes, yes, create another universe, one that you can exist in.

Then I open my eyes, and it's five years later, and my hair is a different color, and I have another name, and she says “This is beautiful sadness, and only a handful of people live in it and understand it.” It sounds so different the second time now, so much more like something invented, or a diluted generic name for such a complex thing. It even scares you, the treachery of her saying that. But she is not the same person that said it five years ago. That person is dead, and this person leans out car windows and shouts to people and drags me out into the city when I'd run back to our hotel room and hide. I have traded places with the meek. I'm living a stranger's life. A stranger who navigates the city and goes backstage after the show and teaches people how to repair their computers and drives out alone at night to visit people she's never met. Who the hell are you? How did you come out of this timeline?

She lives with utter disregard. She throws away, gives away records that you gave her. She stands with her eyes closed in the middle of the crowded room, hearing the music that you never got to hear, swaying slightly and lost in that universe like you never existed. Make no mistake - it was an utter disregard. Then she goes to bed that night, and closes her eyes, and she can still see the wallpaper print and the carving at the bottom of your dresser, from when she slept on your floor. I stared at the foot of that dresser for half that night, at the curves in the shape of a violin. You were obsessed with violins. So is she. How I pray for a difference to emerge, something to draw the line between memory and reality, but it only ever gets more paralyzingly surreal.

Time spent trying to hold on to the past is wasted. Time spent trying to forget the past becomes a cruel joke, as the future becomes what has already happened.

My sister, we didn't know what a portrait of Southern Gothic that we painted at the time. We just didn't know. We lived in a different century, a parallel universe to everybody else around us. Our long flower-print dresses and our long hair up in buns and our lace chokers. We pulled it off without realizing we were pulling anything off. Run outside together, spin around to watch our skirts billow out, laugh.

Of course you were living a dream from which you eventually had to wake up.

Now I live in the little house, no more humongous third story rooms for me, no more feeling like I live in a tower detached from the rest of the world, and we have electric heating which keeps us insulated in the winter and the Internet which keeps us nice and numb in the summer. The new people don't know you. I don't know you.

Yet in an instant, I'm back in your rooms, and I sit on the edge of your bed, and you smile weakly and say “Why don't you go in the other room for a bit and read what I wrote last night?” You wanted to sleep longer, but you would never say that.

And then I wake at dawn again not two months ago, and sit in the chair by the bed for centuries, staring out the window, which is on the opposite side of the bed now, and she wakes long enough to tell me that I should watch television, it won't wake her.

I get up and go in the bathroom and stare in the mirror. My eyes are rimmed with red. My hair reeks of his smoke. I'm not sure if this is reality, or if I've lost it all over again. It seems impossible that everything happened in this lifetime, let alone in a single decade.

Yes, you were right, both. This is the beautiful sadness. But you can have it.