ONE I am a well-developed character in a book. My name is You. I do not exist in between the pages or before or after the story takes place. The end of my story is the end- there are to be no predictions or assumptions because outside of the story I simply don’t exist. I was born when I was twelve years old. I was born, like Athena, a warrior, sprung from the mind of my creator. Trapped in parody, I was born fully clothed. Grown, clothed, and ready for war. My first words, meant to be a question, were, “I’m immobile?” I was born bound to a hospital bed and the woman, who said she was my mother, did not answer my question. She assumed it was just the recent-scuffle-with-anesthesia type of confusion. I was then alone in the room, left alone to venture and discover and learn what I could about life. --------- Lesson 1: Flora. Explore from the inside out. Treat your body as a geographical body to be investigated carefully. The plant life of the body is the pain. It grows and breaths and spreads thoughtlessly. Survey of the body revealed different species: 1. Agony: Deep, cold, heavy, pain, originating in the left arm but covering a vast area and only beginning to disperse at the shoulder. 2. Excruciation: A hot, shallow, sharp pain as if it had been a fire-soaked tissue draped over my right knee. 3. Anguish: Native to the back muscles but found in colonies virtually anywhere, these cramps are tremors of deep twisting pain. 4. Sting: Needles go in, tubes go out. 5. Burn: Raw and hot. Lives in the throat to prevent swallowing. 6. Ach:. The dull, hopeless, protest of the rest of the body. Q. Who is born broken? A. It’s a girl folks! An infant teenager. Labor induced by a bad broken arm. Conceived in the head of a scared little girl. Mother unknown, Father unknown. Yes, the source of the demonic seed is unknown but certainly it is something far more sinister than a broken arm. Shall we review for the test? --------- There isn’t much to tell about the first couple months of my life. Most memories of it are hazy and undeveloped- they had me on a morphine drip for a little while. I met my family and went “home”. I should have wondered if everyone lived in a house where garbage rotted on the floor. I didn’t question much and ate little and slept a lot. Everyone around me seamed caught in something much bigger and much more complicated and important. The day before I was to get my cast off I didn’t wake back up. I sound like fiction. --------- I think therefore I am. In the dark this becomes every aspect of my philosophy. It becomes my mantra. I attempt to make sense of consciousness. I had conscious existence but now have only consciousness. I have no body. I have no time. I have no space, but I am aware of the lack of it. It is beyond my understanding. --------- My second existence: I wake up in a bathroom completely confused. Before I can focus I am ushered into a car with my family? On the outside, a month had gone by. I went to sleep in august, (maybe late July), and awoke in September. It is a different home and with a different family. My sister’s name is Sue; before, when I had a brother, his name was Ryan. My father has silver hair. Before, his hair was brown. Sue tells me that my (our?) mother tried to kill herself and is in the hospital. That night I slept in the emptiness. --------- I’m a different person. They are calling me Rachael now. I rationalize: Consciousnesses must take turns in different bodies so they can experience different sorts of things. Right now I am experiencing “Rachael”. Other people are older and have been doing it longer. That’s why they seem so natural. After a few months maybe I will get be famous person. I wonder how random it is. Is it like mixing up a deck of cards or shaking up a jar of marbles or does it depend on what you do? I think that’s it- reincarnation. If you are good in one you get a better place in the next one. --------- I asked Sue about it. I said, “I’m new at this. This is only my second life. What advice can you give me?” She looked at me like I was insane but never asked me about it. She probably assumed she misheard me. People have a tendency to ignore things that don’t fit into their carefully defined construct of the world. (Not me! I was BORN outside the box.) It took me a couple days to realize that I was in the same person. I rejected a lot of the obvious evidence, as my sci-fi fantasy life sounded much cooler. There was no responsibility in that. My arm hurt a lot and soon brought me back to reality. Ryan came home from the friend’s house he had been staying at and I realized that my father was there, at nights, always drunk or worse, but there. Reality existed in a logical way again. External things made sense, and everyone else had personal understanding of their past, present and consciousness. The question no longer lied in the nature of existence but in my personal existence, as I clearly was not the person everyone thought I was.

Chapter 2