Alice was wrong. A looking glass is not the gateway to untold worlds. It takes precision to accomplish that kind of journey. One doesn’t just crash through a mirror and expect to find something unexpected. But an electric socket? That is the way to many other sides, but you have to be exact. Too much of the current and you could discover the truth or fiction of the afterlife. Too little and you might as well have eaten too much candy for all the jolt you get. If you are able to get it just right though, it’s like all your circuits fire at once and brain currents that never would have met cross and whatever it is that is you is instantly on a trip. I’m eleven years old, and I’ve been on hundreds of journeys. I’ve lived hundreds of lives. I’ve grown old. I’ve grown young. I’ve been female, male, transgender, and lacking gender. My lives have been quiet or famous or subversive or rebellious or murderous or typical. I can do anything, and I will do everything as long as I have time to let the right electrical forces meet.
The first time was around age three - a lucky accident of childhood curiosity. I am addicted. Unlike other drugs, the first time was merely an introduction. The power and clarity of my universes only increase with each attempt. That first world… sometimes I wish I could go back there to experience it fully. It was like moving through fog; nothing stops you from moving except your inability to gather information about your surroundings. Going back, however, is against the rules. Not the physical ones. I can end up back somewhere I’ve been before. My rules. When making the final exit, the desire of and for that world must be left behind. I don’t care to live with longing. It’s incredibly limiting, so I leave longing like the things you throw away when moving; you would like to keep them, but they are more of a burden than they are worth. Usually, I imagine my desire that way. I pack it in a box and leave it at the threshold. It is a sad liberation, but I carry little emotional baggage back from the other places.
With all of this traveling and all of these lives, I still don’t know why I always come back to this one, this body. Is this actual reality? Why? Are the families and friends of all my other selves merely figments of a heightened imagination? It’s impossible, and no one who hasn’t experienced at least one other life can convince me otherwise. These places are too real, too logical in their own logic – not dream logic but whatever the prevailing rules for that planet are.
I don’t think I should stop. Even with all of consequences. My parents’ faces when one of them finds me lying on the floor with frizzed hair and a singed hem. Or my teachers noses that curl as if they smelled an offensive odor whenever I speak. Or the rocks the other children throw at me whenever the adults are not watching. My peers fear me for so many reasons. I could try to fit in and stop the abuse, but there is always a place full of confidantes or hangers on somewhere between my brainwaves. Why change now?
There is one thing that does worry me about this electrical play. EST: Electro-shock therapy. I don’t have enough information, but I’ve heard the horror stories, and it adds an edge to my travels. What if I end up a shell of a person with no life here or anywhere else to live? I’m sure what I need to know would be fairly simple to find or calculate, but if I look and find that it will cause an anti-future, will I stop? Will I be forced to? Will I be able to? Will I care to? I don’t know. I hope, if that’s what is coming for me here in this life that I kill myself trying to cross over instead. I’d rather be a corpse than a vegetable. Unless I’m making too many assumptions and judgments of the lives of vegetables. Maybe those souls’re anchored in one of the other worlds and because of this planet’s laws of matter, they leave a low functioning animal body – their box of desire and longing. We are not their actual reality, merely their crossed currents. They’ve gone home or left on another adventure or are resting in some paradise while this body minds the dreams and relationships they created here.
This is the abrupt stop I mentioned. It's going somewhere but my brain is still working out the where.
The first time was around age three - a lucky accident of childhood curiosity. I am addicted. Unlike other drugs, the first time was merely an introduction. The power and clarity of my universes only increase with each attempt. That first world… sometimes I wish I could go back there to experience it fully. It was like moving through fog; nothing stops you from moving except your inability to gather information about your surroundings. Going back, however, is against the rules. Not the physical ones. I can end up back somewhere I’ve been before. My rules. When making the final exit, the desire of and for that world must be left behind. I don’t care to live with longing. It’s incredibly limiting, so I leave longing like the things you throw away when moving; you would like to keep them, but they are more of a burden than they are worth. Usually, I imagine my desire that way. I pack it in a box and leave it at the threshold. It is a sad liberation, but I carry little emotional baggage back from the other places.
With all of this traveling and all of these lives, I still don’t know why I always come back to this one, this body. Is this actual reality? Why? Are the families and friends of all my other selves merely figments of a heightened imagination? It’s impossible, and no one who hasn’t experienced at least one other life can convince me otherwise. These places are too real, too logical in their own logic – not dream logic but whatever the prevailing rules for that planet are.
I don’t think I should stop. Even with all of consequences. My parents’ faces when one of them finds me lying on the floor with frizzed hair and a singed hem. Or my teachers noses that curl as if they smelled an offensive odor whenever I speak. Or the rocks the other children throw at me whenever the adults are not watching. My peers fear me for so many reasons. I could try to fit in and stop the abuse, but there is always a place full of confidantes or hangers on somewhere between my brainwaves. Why change now?
There is one thing that does worry me about this electrical play. EST: Electro-shock therapy. I don’t have enough information, but I’ve heard the horror stories, and it adds an edge to my travels. What if I end up a shell of a person with no life here or anywhere else to live? I’m sure what I need to know would be fairly simple to find or calculate, but if I look and find that it will cause an anti-future, will I stop? Will I be forced to? Will I be able to? Will I care to? I don’t know. I hope, if that’s what is coming for me here in this life that I kill myself trying to cross over instead. I’d rather be a corpse than a vegetable. Unless I’m making too many assumptions and judgments of the lives of vegetables. Maybe those souls’re anchored in one of the other worlds and because of this planet’s laws of matter, they leave a low functioning animal body – their box of desire and longing. We are not their actual reality, merely their crossed currents. They’ve gone home or left on another adventure or are resting in some paradise while this body minds the dreams and relationships they created here.
This is the abrupt stop I mentioned. It's going somewhere but my brain is still working out the where.
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