Amnesia Or Time Travel

I’m not myself. I’m not Michelle Kathleen O’Kane. I’m just a foggy picture of whatever I once was. 

Now I’m a fading, static instant photograph. Shake it like a Polaroid picture. Words inside my head shake. Letters and punctuation and quotation marks floating around this turbulent area behind the bones of my skull. 

The universe, inside my head, is a flat Polaroid picture. I’m searching for light to force emulsion. But this empty brain inside this skull is dark. To dark to develop the lives of all the versions of myself I've lived. Now I’m collecting layers—negative and positive layers, which help me diffuse into the infinitely developing images. My lives.

Time travel is complex. Memories are never the same place twice. 

This place. This soft gray shawl, my WIP on my bed. On my west elm side table a book waits to be read. Dare To Surrender. By Lilly Feisty. Me.

Me Before and Me After incessantly converse about me. I wake up while driving in various cars, and I’m always the driver. Cars. I often travel in time. I find myself in the driver's seat in incongruous cars: 72 Blue Nova, yellow VW rabbit—I got this car when my mother died. Blue Ford Ranger. New. Miata! Purchased that new, too. 

I received a bit of money when my mom died. So when I turned 18 I could spend my inheritance on whatever the fuck I wanted. I bought house. In Santa Clara. I made a garden. 

Aware. When I’m driving I surround myself with the color-changing hills. I’m humming along with Elvis Costello.  I’m watching the detectives. (The Angels Wanna Wear) my red shoes. 

I’m now pointed west, driving 92 toward Half Moon Bay. I’m various makes of cars, all of which I owned. Today I’m driving a clutch—my blue Ford Ranger. This is the car I purchased with the money I received after my mother died. 

I am now 18, and she’d died just a few months ago, while I was 17. Just before my mother died she’d received several thousand dollars, and then my brother and I inherited that money. So, of course, I spent it. 

I’ve finally come to realized and understand how crazy I am. 

I haven’t watched a movie with another person in over 5 years. I haven’t laughed with someone in as many years. A few times something I’m watching or hearing has caused the sound—the sharp chirp of a laugh. The noise scares me. Hearing my own laugh is such an unfamiliar sound that it shocks me. Then, of course, anxiety crushes those feelings and I have no idea why. Or maybe I do, but forgot. 

I’m jealous of so many things I see on TV. Landscapes and cities and people at tables with white espresso cups. 

Lives.