How the angel crossed the road...

I'm on a pedestrian bridge high above the freeway. Just ahead of me, there's a bird, pecking at something in the tarmac. I said, "Hey bird, you lazy. You're supposed to fly over the freeway, not walk over it." He stopped pecking and replied, "Hey angel, where have you lost your wings?"

I open my eyes. I am walking through a graveyard. There are rows and rows of tombstones and they all have the same name on them - my own. The dates are different. The styles are different. I listen to my breathing. I touch my face. My heartbeat continues. But the physical sensations seem surreal. They spread out and trip my mind. The more I try to convince myself that I am alive, the more it feels like I'm really something else.

I close my eyes. No one must know I am here. For some time now, Reenie has been hiding me from a world that believes I'm dead. Somewhere along the way, she transcended to a higher aspect of her self - Storywoman. I tell her story and she tells mine. So who writes the story? And who becomes it? My problems are like those of someone has forgotten what he is? And yet, it is not that I have amnesia. Someone with amnesia remembers nothing. My problem is more complicated, as I remember several versions of the past that has brought me here. They could all be true. They could all be false. In one, I meet Reenie/Storywoman in a Kurdish coffee shop with tribal musical instruments and tapestries on the walls. I follow her home. In another, I close my eyes in a hospital emergency room and wake up behind Reenie's eyes. I experience flashbacks of her life. She is surprised to find those memories back. Reenie and I are the pill dissolved into water. Difficult to tell where one begins and the other ends. There is a Reenie who stumbles across my obituary and recognizes me, although we never met. She calls me to her and I take the greatest leap of faith. There is a world where I am alive, in my own body, writing this, furtively, fearing discovery....

I open my eyes. Storywoman and I are having a tea party with the Sane Hatter. There's a funny story about how we met him, but I haven't remembered it yet. We started a game of draughts. The game pieces are cookies. If you win an opponents game piece, you get to eat it. Loser goes hungry. Those are the rules.

I close my eyes.... To continue, click here