Feeling: Wordy and philosophical
Listening to: Rufio- One Slowdance
Reading/Watching: I'm thinking of changing this field. It's completely pointless, n'est-ce pas?

There are times I really start to believe in the idea of past lives.

Most of the time I think it's silly: an extension of imagination crossed with the schizophrenic ability of the subconscious to convince us of anything, no matter how improbable.

It explains so many romantic ideas, like soulmates, fate, kismet, because supposedly that person is the one you've been united with (or divided from) through all eternity, and that's a lovely thing to believe in (I still do believe in it, for other people... but it's getting harder and harder for me to believe in my own personal soulmate).

The concept of past lives also explains some people's obsession with a certain previous time or place, because they might have lived a good life there, or had unfinished business that will always be unresolved. (Don't start with hypnotists and gypsies. That could as easily be fabrication by the practitioner--and our willingness to believe--as it could be truth.)

I've always had dreams, the kind where I don't remember whether I was awake or not, and as I grow they become more defined. They're probably just as psychadelic as all my dreams, but after waking I refine them to an image of myself, looking, speaking, behaving comfortably in a place I've never seen.

Sometimes I'm a middle-class daughter in a hoopskirt, having her modest come-out in London, sometimes I'm a shy schoolteacher scraping by in Boston tenements, sometimes I'm a nun in a French convent in an unknown century.

The next two stick with me, because they're not of me at my current age or younger.

One is an eccentric old woman who sits in her house writing novels all day, surrounded by clutter and several house cats, who has locked herself into her own mind so gradually that by the time she wakes up and realizes she's a complete hermit, she doesn't even care anymore. She has Christmas and Thanksgiving with her parents and siblings, but the rest of the year she's too self-absorbed in the characters she reads and creates to miss the husband, children, friends she's always wanted. (This one is so vivid, I've even written a character like her, named Amilee Parks in the short story Old Habits, which I'm thinking of making into a novel.)

The other is me as a thirtysomething kooky theater/music teacher, saying emphatic, artistic things that are completely over my students' heads, generally liked in that impersonal admiring way, with a wild mop of hair and expressive hands, teaching at a miniscule highschool somewhere in midwestern America. She's also unmarried, and too busy in her work to mourn the cold side of the bed, which is usually occupied by three or four pets.

It's funny. In every single vision, I'm alone. It might be because I've spent so long without a one true companion, but I never see myself with anyone, male or female.

I see myself solitary, resigned to independence, and eventually happy (well, content) with it. The images are so clear, it's hard to believe it's just my own imagination cooking it up.

Scary. Maybe that will be me someday. But every romantic bone in my body rebells against such a future, even as it fantasizes in the apparently conflicting ideas: fate and choice, soulmates and past lives.

The hopeful part of me says it's all imagination anyway, that it's out of my hands and up to God, who wouldn't doom me to a life that I neither wanted, nor could benefit from. The cynical side says it's just my childish idealism warring with that sixth sense people seem to have, where we suspect our fate before it happens, and inwardly begin to prepare for it.

None of the images seem particularly evil, or terribly sad. Just... too complacent. Lonely. As if I gave up where I should have fought. As if I hid instead of sought. As if I waited when I should have leapt forward.

The bridge between now and future is constantly approaching. I hope I can recognize it when it comes.

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