parallel universe

[trisherina]

Write about things you do, what happens to you, the way you live in a parallel universe. It's easy, and all the cool kids are doing it.

In a parallel universe I live alone in a tiny gingerbready bungalow with flocked yellow wallpaper, ferns, and only dim indirect light, in a very old neighbourhood. At night I wait in terror for a poltergeist to appear and open doors and cupboards and leave strange smells.

[zero]

there is no need to speak; each of us hears the other's thoughts; through the music and voices they all run together, not just sounds but scents and scraps of vision: lights, moths, perfumes, tunnels, shells, streams. half ideas: the notation of a tendency towards the circular, a neatness we have known about for years, expressed in a strange algebra of island names and symbols on marine charts.

[12"razormix]

the constant seesaw motion of a boat. endless stream of thoughts read from a book, the book, no book at all. feeling your heart beat and wondering whether it's yours and knowing yes it's yours. yours not mine. ours. this is the way it is. no doubts no regrets.

[dddrum]

I have, mysteriously but with dead certainty, become aware that my life is being observed by a group of young people from another... planet, plane... place. I can sense them watching my everyday goings-on with excitement and anticipation, sort of like a favorite TV show that has you running home from school so you don't miss a minute of it, and I'm pretty sure they are sizing me up for induction into their... club, troop... organization. I hope I can measure up to their expectations, and I try to appear courageous and clever in every situation, no matter how trivial. I am hoping they contact me soon, especially because I have been sensing an extra measure of interest from one of the girls... the brunette with the electric blue eyes and dimpled smile who resembles that girl, Donna Warner, who sits diagonally across from me in Civics class. I think she likes me, a lot. This other girl, I mean. Donna told Mr. Ocenasek that I was staring at her, and I got laughed at by pretty much everybody. I hope the Club wasn't watching me at that particular moment. Maybe there was a commercial on, or perhaps they were having lunch...

[trisherina]

I stare at the stuccoed ceiling; I can see a cameo lady directly above, slightly angled to the left but always there. Sometimes I look out the bars of my crib/bed into a dim room, at the doors of a closet on one side and at the door to the room on the other. I prefer the latter because sometimes someone will pass by, or sometimes people will even stand in the doorway and chat. They don't think I know anything, but I do, and I like the one who ties up the little wisps of hair at the top of my head in a ribbon the best.

[Jack Flanders]

OK - I want to contribute but need to figure out what happy *stuff* I need. (I'm not editing, either! FFS)

[trisherina]

Do you ever imagine yourself as someone else?

Write about it. :)

[Jack Flanders]

I want to be Trish and walk all those miles and have her legs!!! :)

[Odbe]

In an alternate universe, I write about a girl who has nothing better to do than post on a message board...

[zero]

always the wet whisper of silt when tidewater seeps away and the estuary rises to the boatyard through copper light. forever a tender of blue beachglass and scales and driftwood crusted with salt. now a circle we walk for miles in search of shells, picking starfish from a sheet of silver tension, bemused by the trails of viscera, the threads of bloodless meat and resurrected forms that have no names but offer us kinship and memory in an unknown tense. then the pulse between the water and our hands, and always a feeling of something old and buried deep. heartbeat and vision. quickening sand.

[Brynn]

Instead of talking fast and confidently, (ending with me getting out of the car and into the fresh air and bright sunlight, trembling but alive), instead I believe him and decide to place my dreams in his hands.
He drives me back up the hill to the big empty house, throws me a fancy dress and shows me the make-up. He tells me to put lots of it on. No, more. He tells me we're going to an important party and to do what he says. He gives me a little pill to relax me, and the next several hours are indecipherable from dreams and nightmares. I wake up shivering, naked and beat up on the side of a road. I feel relieved and lucky. I don't know where I am. There are no lights anywhere. The empty highway runs alongside the ocean. Even though it's November, I run into the ocean to hide and cry and wonder how to get back to where I was.

[nycwriters]

Sorry for third-person but this popped into my head.

For the past three days, when Fred Bear emerges from his house to run errands for the wife or head down to the the local fishing pool to play hookey on life's chores, he's been accosted by a little blonde girl with bowlsful of porridge. At first the shock of hot sticky gruel running down his fur coat stunned him to silence. Then after a subsequent attack, and then another, he grew nervous at every creak or groan his house would make or jump at the sound of a child's laughter (when before it used to make him smile in a fatherly way). His wife tells him he's silly, it's only a little girl after all, and it's not like she's spraying him with bullets. But he can't help it. The memory of those little blonde ringlettes, the blue-blue eyes, the rosy cheeks, the flowered dress and kneesocks, the delerious laughter .. well it keeps him up at nights. He thinks, 'maybe next time I'll just eat her.'

[rapscalious rob]

I walk into the thick of the crowd, past the fish markets and glowing neon signs, the massage parlors and the bao kiosks. As I plod down the stairs, the rumbling sounds of construction reminds me of the distant shock of homelessness and the smell of mud.

[Brynn]

In a parallell universe, I am flying over empty white sand and blue water. The sun is very hot on my back. I spot a flash of silver swimming below. I fold my outstretched arms to my sides, and dive deeply past coral beds and underwater cafe's, where I stop for a bite of sushi and some sake. Feeling refreshed, I make my way to the surface, climb into the air, and feel the water evaporate instantly from my skin as i continue my gliding.

[trisherina]

Perhaps in a parallel universe (http://www.dbfletcher.com/files/dbfletcher_capstan_schwartz.mov), I married one of my father's colleagues, and he owns a couple of yachts that we sail around in with clients and family at the holidays... the remainder of the time I pursue a preoccupation with botany and secretly yearn to go to a women's Ivy League college and smoke cigarettes and pursue a career of my own, like so many of my friends did. But there's a lot to be said for just being caught up in the day to day hubbub of keeping up three homes, one in St. Lucia and the others in Boston and California's Sonoma County -- and the two yachts, one sailing and one motor -- maintenance and bills and friends to see and family to tend to and our own two small children -- there just never seems to be time for a career, and I'm happy. Why wouldn't I be happy? He was so handsome when he was younger, and so gallant, and he loved to go shopping with me and watch me try on the dresses and we'd have long lunches in the watercolour sunlight, bags at our feet, and I hardly noticed back then that his breath smelled just like my father's did in the morning and that his toenails were old toenails, thick as antlers. I'll grow older, too, won't I, and have these things happen to me? You bet I will, and he won't mind a bit.

[zero]

we'd be on a trip following double yellow lines in the middle of a long straight road and the road would become steeper and steeper and steeper until finally it was plunging vertically down and the stars would come out around us and we'd fall past the strata and then somewhere along the way another road would form on the side of the cliff and we would land on it and begin striding as hard as we could up what's now become a very steep hill and when we finally crested on top of the hill that's when we would be in the parallel universe.






.

[Brynn]

Candles, scotch, a fireplace, eight soft red chairs around a round table and uproarious laughter in three different languages. An abandoned hand of hearts mixed in with crumbs of good bread. Eye contact and secrets and stories. Everyone's essential tribal nature has not changed, and all that made them laugh and feel loved was intact tonight as they rediscovered who they had been before everything changed.

[trisherina]

She sits at the table across from the window open over the sink, the moldy dry dishcloth caught up with bits of an omelette and sausage that she had for lunch, smoking, exhaling at the window but not really caring; the frigid breeze is to cool her hot and clammy skin down before the next flush. An ice cube in the tall plastic cup at her right hand pops and bobs in the clear fizzy liquid but she pays it no attention -- she is perfecting what she thinks of as her absent gaze, indifferent, aloof and slightly melancholic -- but without benefit of feedback she does not realize that the look is merely vacuous.

[Coffee]

The tedium only slightly relieved by the ever present possiblity of total and complete destruction should one of the thousands of critical systems fail, he completed his routine engineering checks, returned to his seat by the view screen and put up the latest E-novel retrieved from the databanks. It was a historical novel, about pre-spaceflight Earthers and the day to day struggles they encountered while trapped on the gravity well, the only place they had to call home. It seemed metaphorical of the same dynamics we experience today amoung the varied crews bound together on these interstellar behemoths we call home these days...."days"...what a retro term that was now. It struck him how hard it was now to imagine a time when our species lived out their entire lives planet bound, their clock lives regulated by the spin of their planet, their lives dependant on the clemency of natural random forces...forces that caused the destruction of the Earth's biosphere just 2 hundred years ago with the help of ingnorance, greed, and a black asteroid that went undetected till it was far to late to do anything about it. He wondered what it would be like to be on a planet, and wasn't sure if he could bear to live planet side, even if he had the option, which he didn't since the ship wasn't due to make planet fall for another 4 generations. No, he decided, despite the risks of a life in space, at least the risks were "man"agable...and preventable. With any notion of "indestructableness" a total farce out here, living in a tiny duranium bubble in space, people worked now for the common good, and our community was strong, our bonds tight. All of our lives depend on the diligence of each other, just as it always had been, but now it was obvious to everyone. It was a good trade in his opinion, giving up the bright illusion of "security" for the stark reality of "dependence".

[zero]

mid november and i'm standing outside in the garden watching the bonfire i've built of driftwood and leaves. letters for kindling and apples amongst the flames. the last of summer is dropping through the embers, and there's that perfume again. it's in the shade, rive gauche, nearly viburnum. iceblink hangs in solid air, a blank ness along the canal waits to be filled and given the silence, the promise of frost. i welcome this as something else: the taste of windfalls moving on the millstream, a faint god's partial emergence through yew and oak.

the riverbank is darkening now and fades. the garden is recovering its creatures: blackbird and crow sifting the dead in the still of the damsons, pipistrelle and frog insinuating dusk. across the estuary evening is bleeding the trees. my neighbour's garden blurs to smoke and rain: i'm thinking that strembonita is over the eastern horizon, standing in her own garden she rakes leaves then bends to clutch a handful of twigs and straw to breath a life into our fire.

[Mun Chee Chee]

test

[jasmina]

somebody's rather testy today


hahahahhaa :)

[trisherina]

Every day the fish and chips place is the same: the light on the blue-and-white checked oilcloth overbright but friendly as though a rainfall just stopped, and the oily scent of bergamot and everyone quiet, reading their newspapers. And every day the notepad has only one line at the top: "Telling you something is like putting money in the bank." And the lodgepole pines climbing the hilltop behind, hanging on for dear life, unaware of the busy seaside drive filing past at their feet. Nothing comes but thoughts of the washer and dryer stacked in the tiny closet next to their bedroom and how they've never once eaten breakfast in the sunroom overlooking the sea because it would mean a climb up the stairs with dishes.

[Bman]

In a parallel universe I am a sound that you hear when strange things are afoot.


Not to mention that feet are almost always strange things.

[lostsadie]

Which is why Trish dosn't wear hers

One of my happy places:

A large old house surrounded by old trees with big porches and dim lighted windows. Honeysuckle permeates the air and wisteria vines grow up the low stone wall. Everything is quiet but the song of the crickets and the wind playing the trees like an instrument. The red on the horizon blends from purple to blue lighting up the wispy clouds with orange fire. It's warm enough that you feel like you could run barefoot and naked through the soft grass, twirling and laughing for no other reason than life in you and around you.

[zero]

.
picture us as shadows on la moon. twins gathered together for warm conversation while down there the owls are shifting aside, unlocked from the visible world and the rain in the trees. each of us knows the other as water knows the bodies it transforms. see that colour? that colour is the colour of horizon. la moon's blue. the same blue as the blue of the blue room at the end of the mind where what we love goes on uninterrupted.

[12"razormix]

.
there he was. standing perfectly still in his own solitary world secluded from the rest of the city on a detached old bridge segment. the beautiful heron, viewing the chaos in front of him across the water as i was leaving the chaos behind me behind me. none of this has any meaning to him. beautiful.

.

[Frieda]

only when i close my eyes i can see it. the true beauty of mother earth. her love makes me feel honored to take part in this, to exist. for years i denounced myself her beauty. but now i understand that i have as much right to be here as everybody else. just because i am. what a great gift to give, and such an honor to receive. me, humble me. just sitting here.

[lukkucairi]

the sound about splits my head open. a rolling chime, so loud that my bones resonate.

upstairs, right now. hand on the railing, stairs two at a time - the rooftop door against my elbow (that'll leave a mark) and then out onto the silvered tarpaper, cool breeze against my face.

a fog has risen from the lake, to the east. cars on the highway by the lakeshore have stopped.

even the gulls have ceased their wheeling, and perch atop lampposts and rooflines, all facing east, all expectant.

sudden wind. the fog is torn into strips and flung skyward.

revelation:

hanging over the lake, hanging impossibly in the cool morning air, is a mirrored sphere perhaps a mile in diameter.

[brightpearl]

In a parallel universe, I can't imagine wanting things to be any way other than they are.

[lukkucairi]

^^^ in a parallel universe, your eyes are a different color :)

[trisherina]

It isn't about wanting to be someone else.

[auntie aubrey]

in a parallel universe, i have no navel. i stand surrounded by a mob, while heads identical to my own bob in unison as we acknowledge en-masse our identical existence. we accept our similarities and forgo the desire for individual expression. where there is uniformity, there is harmony. we fail to see the purpose of discord and seek to eliminate disparity. with minds as one we seek not to innovate, but to obey. will is neither sensible nor optional. we raise one foot, then another, and as a single organism we march.

[lukkucairi]

hanging over the lake, hanging impossibly in the cool morning air, is a mirrored sphere perhaps a mile in diameter.

at first, there is chaos.

news crews. national guard. UFO freaks and conspiracy theorists. the sphere is probed and prodded, all to no effect. it cannot even be scratched. nobody can figure out how it defies gravity.

the sphere hangs there, unperturbed, for five years.

during this time I change jobs, start and end an unfulfilling relationship, and acquire a small dog from the local pound. I name the dog Felix. I do not move from my tiny apartment, though, because it has an unparalleled view of the sphere.

[brightpearl]

It isn't about wanting to be someone else.

Yeah, that was kind of my point. [/melancholy]

[12"razormix]

in a parallel universe i hear every word that you say.

your eyes reflect everything i see and i feel your words on my skin.

laughter has taken the place of punctuation and i no longer worry.

never again.

[zero]

.

molotov, early. it's warm enough, so we're sitting out on the balcony we know from a dream. talking quietly. then, haunted by winds, we're slipping out through miles of light to unfold, one heartbeat at at a time at the wet edge of horizon. a wavelength given form beyond the ebb and the flow. a flock of birds, mingling like rain.

[brightpearl]

Time and space are as masonry clay:
As I so choose, here they may be set like baked bricks, trustworthy for hanging pictures and shelves of beloved books, or the whole of life. They shelter my decisions to go in or out, to own or not, to grow or not.

Here, they may smooth out the edges of the mind's wide plain, cover the nicks and bumps of dissatisfaction. I forget, if I wish it, what is underneath.

Or there, they may be nothing but change and process -- I may squeeze two points together and step from here to there as a child across a puddle, I may skip time or slow time or merely watch as it erodes, and in this way there is the illusion of choice. For a time I may pretend that I've set a course for a point marked on a map, that there are no loved ones separated from me by distance or the permanence of death, that there are no broken teacups or wounded birds or berries rotting on the vine. I dream that I may grasp all loves and eschew all pains at will. But Process is the master here. There are no hanging places, no shelter worthy of confidence.

All is outside, nothing is owned, and there is no choice but to grow and die eternally, together in the same breath.

[Frieda]

the heat of the rocks is vibrating, radiating into my soul. the rhythm of the earth, my molecules dancing, i am part of this. i am. i am the universe.

[Brynn]

I am floating in liquid diamonds, and breathing pure love. I am floating up and up and up. I am speechless. My mouth is open wide. My eyes are full. It goes on forever, and I become one of the diamonds.

[brightpearl]

What do you mean, "become"?
;)

[T.I.P.]

burrowing down my forepaws are aching but I must dig faster he's right behind me I can smell him just as he can smell me ooh that worm looks tasty but there's no time I must keep going before he catches up the underground stream is right up ahead I can tell by the way the soil is becoming moist only a few inches left

[brightpearl]

I keep my hair short and wear a lot of eye makeup. I don't wash it off before bed. I have a kept man in the city center, and we never buy each other flowers.

[Coffee]

It is 4 months out and thus far the excitement level is still pretty high. I can't believe I was chosen for the trip, and me just an artist for heck's sake, none of us can really. The applicant list was MUCH larger than anyone in NASA could have imagined. Most of us believe that it was our ability to "get along" as determined by the psych evaluations that really won us our positions on the ship, more so than our "skills", since "getting along" is bound to be our biggest challenge several years from now when the initial excitement wears off and the reality of being cooped up on in a titanium can for 25 years sinks in. I can't help thinking how easy it might have been for this to not even have happened. If Brezhnev hadn't made that remark shortly after Apollo 11 made it's historic landing "Those lazy arrogant Americans will give up progress on their program as soon as they feel they have made their point" we just might have put our space program on hold and concentrated on some lame arms race instead. Instead, here we all are, bound for the stars finally. I'll be celebrating my birthday in a few weeks, but I don't think any gift can equal just being able to celebrate it here.

Nov 3rd, 2007
Starship "Vangaurd"
3rd officer, Education and Records
M. Coffee.
Personal log.

[trisherina]

The real is kept as deep down as it goes, and when the pressure grows too great it makes a bitter green-gray mess spraying in erratic, hitching spurts until it can be contained again. The surface is smooth sweet shiny enamel, cool or warm in response to a touch here, a touch there, and it would contain the real fully but for the beady eyes that claim to see everything, in fact providing a breach to see into and soft weak spots for the pressure to gnaw at.

[Jaime]

I am carried by strong arms to places I can't reach alone.

[trisherina]

I don't know why they left me, but I'm glad they came back. I was pretty sure they'd come back. Well, not that sure really, but it seemed like I was sure once they did come back. Everything seemed to be going pretty well when they left me at the noisy place. I wonder what it was -- maybe I did something wrong. I'd better be quiet and lay low and try hard to please everyone in case they are thinking about doing it again. Why do they all leave me? I'm probably not good enough. Have to be better. Have to be better.

[Brynn]

I'd like to thank the Academy, and really, what a privilege it is to be considered a colleague amongst the most amazing women, the other actresses I've been nominated with - Helen Mirren, Cate Blanchett, Susan Sarandon, Judi Dench, Emma Thompson...believe me, without your body of work, I wouldn't be standing here....

[magdalen]

http://k43.pbase.com/o4/00/599200/1/52066482.a1a1.jpg
:)

[MoJoRiSin]

failed to connect
(page load error)

[Frieda]

in a parallel universe i rollerskate on boogie beats

sway right, sway right, backturn, left foot over right foot, sway right sway right roll right full stop, left scrape right step
turn, lean left roll, stop scrape split HALT cross feet and double turn.

[Coffee]

i was thinking about diverting to that dead rocky world a parsec off course. Just to stretch my legs. There is plenty of leg room on the frieghter of course...plenty around the massive sealed off cargo and transfer sections of the ship. No im not lacking for space...heh. Natch the company will be pissed at the delay but **** em, as if i'm replaceable. They'll gripe and apeal to customer loyalty, as usual. Hell, one wants to feel a world under them once in a while, an unboxed world, no walls, no plastic windows, no fans or filters..and of course no germs or people.

[MoJoRiSin]

there is no need to speak; each of us hears the other's thoughts; through the music and voices they all run together, not just sounds but scents and scraps of vision: lights, moths, perfumes, tunnels, shells, streams. half ideas: the notation of a tendency towards the circular, a neatness we have known about for years, expressed in a strange algebra of island names and symbols on marine charts.

the constant seesaw motion of a boat. endless stream of thoughts read from a book, the book, no book at all. feeling your heart beat and wondering whether it's yours and knowing yes it's yours. yours not mine. ours. this is the way it is. no doubts no regrets.

carry on...

[trisherina]

I wish I knew why they looked at me so sadly sometimes.

[Stephi_B]

In a parallel universe I didn't run away and I didn't catch the train again and again.
Or maybe I did, but I didn't dare to leave once more - but not that way!
And even if, I did neither really, really open my eyes nor walk astray and I never fell into these eyes like tea.
In a parallel universe I may be dead - bodily or worse:

I'm frozen - and I don't care.

[Frieda]

in a parallel universe the soul is not a noun, but a verb.

[Coffee]

In a parallel universe selfish people are freely given toys, clothes, electronics and computers, jewelery, precious stones and metals, money in whatever quantities they can hoard in their apartments and anything reasonably obtainable that they might desire...however they may not leave the insane asylum grounds without an escort.

[Marcus Bales]

In a parallel universe 'parallel' is spelled 'parralel"

[YsaPur EsChomuw]

^ In yet another it's 'paralell'.

[Marcus Bales]

But in no parallel universe is 'parallel' spelled 'parrallell' -- not even a parallel universe could be so ssillyy.

[lukkucairi]

in a parallel universe I'm a housewife in Raleigh, with three kids and two mortgages and a husband who's trying to open his own microbrewery.

[Marcus Bales]

In a parallel universe, I'm trying to open my own microbrewery with a frustrated light wizard for a wife, three kids, two mortgages, and living in Raleigh.

[trisherina]

I wake up and my jaw doesn't hurt. I poke around it and there is no inflammation. It is 10 AM and the sun is bright. No stirring of the insides. I make coffee and drink it with cream, and nothing happens. I sit and drink it and read things for an hour. I make toast and eat it and still nothing happens. I climb the two sets of stairs to get dressed and never touch the handrail. I could do anything today. There is no need to plan carefully.

[Bman]

I sit down at the keyboard, think of something interesting to say. Not too mushy or poetic, something just right. I make no typos, question no choice of words. I find just the right topic, one where I am in on the joke. I sit back and hit send and continue on my merry way through the internet. I am balanced. I make no attempt to bring "her" in to the conversation. Most importantly, I resist the urge to get all meta.

Shucks, in a parallel universe I am not aware of the word meta and am better for it.

[Marcus Bales]

Goddammit! Who moved the bag of hops?

[lukkucairi]

in a parallel universe, my hair is naturally indigo.

[Coffee]

In a parallel universe you receive requests for quotes for portrait commissions 2 or 3 times a week, sometimes the commission is of a person, a pet, livestock, a deceased loved one, sometimes estates, most usually a yacht or an aircraft (vehicle portraits are your specialty),...and on average one of those inquiries turns into an actual commissioned canvas.
It is noon on a Saturday, and you have 5 pieces in varying states of completion skinning over again after a moderate day's work on each. You are still roughing in the layout on the latest two canvases (fast loose childlike painting, exuberant and active...you love this stage as it is all play and mess and color), another 2 are in the middle stages of nailing down the lighting color depth and edges of main structural masses (careful work, considered, but still malleable and flexible, nothing is in stone yet, still playing but carefully with paint and brush and knife and texture) while you occasionally hunker in close to the nearest to completion to carefully cut in those last hair line details in the rigging (jeweler like precision, focus, magnifying glass and loupe, holding breath and hoping the caffeine doesn't wreck the line, fiddly little brushes squirm out of your hands even as you load the paint let alone try to apply it...this is Work and you are so glad that it will be over soon).
The current yacht portrait of Mystique, a double ended cutter-rigged blue water cruiser, is due next week and you think it could be one of your best so far. The owner's commissioned the piece 3 months ago to commemorate their just completed 5-year circumnavigation. The scene is from their description and photos of an early morning landfall at Torunai Bay in N. New Zealand after an exciting passage in heavy but manageable seas from Tonga. It was their first rough passage and they recalled with fondness that that moment of spotting their landfall with the sun's early golden light shafting through the clouds they had just ran tossed beneath for 10 days, was when they truly developed confidence in their boat and themselves and knew they were going to circle the globe together.
You are charging the couple $3000.00 for the 18"x24" canvas, and hope that it will be worth far more to them when it is done.

[Brynn]

^ this is completely plausible. It's going to happen.

[trisherina]

I sit on the lower bunk and write in my journal about what it would be like if I woke up and had a different brain, and read Archie comics when I can't sleep, which is usually. I am only seven but stayed up all night once already reading comics. My mum was so worried because I was pale after with dark circles under my eyes. I chew my nails and spit out the crescents under the bed and feel a little bad about it, but then forget because I don't see them anymore. I like everyone at school and it bewilders me why not everyone likes me back all the time; I have no trouble liking them all even when they're not very nice sometimes. I think very hard about it, my eyes resting on the dog sitting patiently on the floor with her head on her paws and watching me in case I need anything, always the same to everyone, always ready to be their friend. And then it dawns on me: I have a dog spirit.

[Hyakujo's Fox]

in a parallel universe, you've somehow ended up back in this one.

[MoJoRiSin]

In a parallel uni verse
W=K
X=I
Y=S
Z=zip cope. Just kidding Z=Y : )

((((how do you like them apples)))

[Coffee]

In a parallel universe evolution of intelligence did not switch taxonomic class due to a couple of Very near misses by comets, and you are now trying to distract a raptor gang from your clutch of eggs so you can get back to posting on the Z-board.

[Brynn]

I sit on the lower bunk and write in my journal about what it would be like if I woke up and had a different brain, and read Archie comics when I can't sleep, which is usually. I am only seven but stayed up all night once already reading comics. My mum was so worried because I was pale after with dark circles under my eyes. I chew my nails and spit out the crescents under the bed and feel a little bad about it, but then forget because I don't see them anymore. I like everyone at school and it bewilders me why not everyone likes me back all the time; I have no trouble liking them all even when they're not very nice sometimes. I think very hard about it, my eyes resting on the dog sitting patiently on the floor with her head on her paws and watching me in case I need anything, always the same to everyone, always ready to be their friend. And then it dawns on me: I have a dog spirit.

As a child I stare into a mirror, convinced that someone else is on the other side, living my exact life as a child, only flipped. And she has a niftier name, like Tricia or something. I wonder how she is doing with my same issues on her side of things. As an adult I scour Canada, obsessed with finding the twin I was separated from at birth.