A year ago, I was kidnapped, took a pill and had a dream. I went back to the my 17th year. Then I was in Medellin.
I am not sure whether this is a dream state or an awake state. But somehow I heard somebody say to me, "You haven't written about your depressing life in over a year. I enjoy reading about your depressing life." In this stupor, I thought, ask and you shall receive. If there is a demand, I will supply. I am nothing if not a person pleaser. So here I please you with my fragmented memories, real or otherwise. Writing words and sentences as if Instagram and Twitter didn't exist.
The most recent person I recall meeting was a woman named Madame X. She was alternately blonde and brunette in this dream. She had an eye patch, and an accordion. Sometimes she was licking the toe of a handsome Latin man. Then she released a pigeon from the rooftop of a New York City building. She was often surrounded by a group of chanting women who called themselves Orquestra Batukadeiras. I was mesmerized. I could sense this woman's aura. She was not like the others. She was powerful. She spoke of things that made people uncomfortable. She acted against people's expectations. It's a hard life when you don't fit into the roles other people want you to play. Then one night, Madame X went to a discotheque. It was by bad fate or by bad luck that a mad man chose that night and that place to go on his rampage. But life is always lived either by fate or by luck. Madame X was gunned down along with many others. The moment right before, they were dancing as if there were no tomorrow. Turns out there wasn't.
But then Madame X has many lives.
There were others in my dream too. A woman named Fleabag who owned a guinea pig themed cafe; she was savagely self-destructive but in a really funny way. A cool chick detective named Veronica in a town named Neptune. A teenage boy who went on a European vacation and met an experienced older Mysterio man. Call him by his name Peter. A Korean family who owned a convenience store in Toronto. A software engineer who died over and over again, starting over each time in a bathroom to the Harry Nilsson song Gotta Get Up. A band of teenagers fighting scary, strange things in a shopping mall in the halcyon summer of 1985.
I don't know what these people have in common, and how they thread into my story. They mean something. I will figure it out eventually.
There is a line that Madame X sang. "I know what I am. And I know what I am not." It makes me infinitely sad for some reason. It's a moment where even this powerful human being is admitting, in the end, I am just me - every reincarnation, every reinvention, every transformation is just a slight of hand. When the smoke clears, I am just left with the me who I had been all along. You cannot fake it. You cannot undo it. You cannot beat it out of you. I look into the mirror, my face all distorted like a Picasso painting. Yet there is no denying, no looking away from that same person. So you try to make peace. Shake hands with the person who was both never good enough and always better than you gave credit for. How do you be true to yourself and then be something more? Maybe it's ok if you can't.
