Parallel Revolver

[TRIGGER WARNING - MENTION OF MENTAL HEALTH, DRUG ABUSE, SEXUAL ABUSE]

I was supposed to be a lot of things.

To my grandmother, I was supposed to be a child star or model turned beauty queen, then an actor. To her, this meant I was supposed to be white; she didn't want me to be born. She'd tell me from a young age how worried she was that I had a black mother. Concerned about how I would come out. Questioned how'd I look and what people would say. She said some of her troubles were swayed because I came out beautiful and intelligent. My grandmother would take me to auditions and do photoshoots against my mother's wishes. Picking me up early from daycare and lying about what and where we were going. Only to find myself in a room full of little girls that didn't look like me. The sharp-eyed parents, with scripts we didn't have, judged us as we walked through the door, but my grandmother never seemed to notice. Maybe she just didn't care. We eventually discovered that I was chronically camera-shy and too ambiguous looking.

Then puberty hit, and I wasn't a novelty anymore. Suddenly defiant, I found words and started to display my inherited stubbornness by having a disdain for wearing dresses, preferring pants, and adopting dark baggy clothes, sports, and arts. I turned into a waste. I was constantly falling short of what was ideal. Tall but not tall enough to be a model at the time or a professional basketball player. I had no affinity for makeup or public speaking and was athletic but occasionally uncoordinated due to genetic illnesses. My grandmother adopted the joke that at least I could blend in with the hookers on 14^th Street.

I had swayed from all the laid paths because that wasn't my universe. There are parallel universes where I become everything everyone wants me to be. And I experience them simultaneously.

There is a universe where I don't have crippling anxiety and sensory sensitivities, where my silliness and extroverted natures are naturally shared with the world. Where I became that baby model, turned cheeky child star, and honorary beauty queen. A universe where my grandmother is back on top and managing my career as I develop a habit of drugs and alcohol. The constant attention, poking, and prodding become too much. The privileges taste toxic and are atomic in weight. I am the shell everyone wants, the mirrored mannequin to be ogled and changed. Now I'm out of date. Bruised and battered, remade and rebranded. You can find me at the thrift shop trying to buy my own merchandise but unable to afford it. The unchecked mental illness that was my silent comedy took its toll. People laughed at me, not with me.

I'm at the end of another depressive cycle about to turn to mania, so I've become bitterly nostalgic and desperately motivated. This would be my comeback, but the unknowing child salesperson won't see the resemblance. I steal my own face and end up in a jail cell. The local paper picks it up, and my old accountant that ran off after my grandmother's untimely death, appears in my life once again to bail me out. Dissociation has me waking up months later in a mental institution; the nurse is a lifelong fan of mine. I find it endearing and torturous in my medicinal coma. Thinking about what could've been if I had laid my own path. If I chose my own projects. If I was camera shy and openly anxious. What would that life have been like? I can answer my own questions. It's part of the revolving insanity that comes with eternity.

There is a shift in consciousness, and I am realigned back within my universe.

After bombing every audition and falling miserably short of expectations, I was left to my own devices and took to drugs and partying; to feel connected and to feel seen. When I drank, I wasn't the immobile false flower painted to the wall; I was a three-dimensional, vividly animated wildflower. A flower that warranted collecting; stood out and begged to be plucked and gathered to become an integral role in any arrangement. But I went to extremes during my self-medication. I had my childhood best friends and a large group of friends and acquaintances. The hangouts after school to find parties, texts about what bars we should go to after work, the group messages about the Friendsgiving this year, and surrogate nieces' and nephews' birthday parties to barely hearing from anyone, to rarely hearing from anyone to the occasional like on your photo, to silence.

The bars and the people were my therapy and pharmacy. I needed real help but lost those closest to me when I got it. The ones I thought I would grow old with. There is a universe where this happens. My best friend and I finally get together, where a one-night stand leads to a child and co-parenting. Another where a marriage leads to us living in my grandparents' house with three kids and a deep-seed resentment that permeates across multiple universes. Except here, we don't speak. I gravitated toward the other friend groups until I found myself alone with my rescue. Our timing was always off, and my traveling to these parallel universes made me question my sanity in thinking about pursuing the relationship again. We both knew it never worked out. There is a world where it's enough.

That's the downside to this type of conscious traveling, you make decisions in your world because of others, but it was all meant to be: every parallel is an infinite overlap of indecisions.

There is a universe where I am a better friend. Or the friend I thought I was supposed to be. Where my childhood best friend is getting married, and I'm her maid of honor. We've spent the last week at her great grandparent's country home that they recently inherited. Her mother had spent no time renovating the manor. Turning the former slave quarters into "he and she" shacks, unveiling the surprise with the quip that "they were her something new: that's old, borrowed and blue." She used to beg her mother to let me come with them during the summer breaks. My mother was sick and could use all the help she could get. Her mother thought I was a beggar kid who would be a bad influence. Little did she know, her daughter initiated our most horrendous ideas and didn't want the drugs to stop flowing until she was ready. When I was the one that tried to get us sober, and we left our respective rehabs, I was the only one to blame.

We hadn't talked much for a few years after she became serious with her once degenerate fiancé, soon-to-be husband. They had gotten sober together. But in private, the toxic nature of their relationship still existed. I'd hear from her when they were going through it again; otherwise, it was a shout-out on holidays and birthdays as our new norm. A part of me wanted to ignore the wedding invitation when it came in the mail after finding out about their engagement through a mutual friend.

It's only been three days, but I've taken to hiding in the upstairs linen closet to escape from the people I haven't seen in years. It was the only quiet place to escape and get high. I felt like the cornered black sheep in a pin of glossed leopards. The stress of life already had me swinging my legs off the sides, but the wedding - and having to see the gang rape devils, otherwise known as the groomsmen - sent me toppling head first off the wagon. We used to have sleepovers in the closet and spent hours at the window seat looking out onto the dusted green acres carved out in the middle of the deep south forestry. Her mother had expanded the closet and changed the warm exposed wood accents into a baby blue and white boutique for towels. At least she turned the window seat into a lounge comfortable enough to sleep on. The bride still snored like a basset hound with sleep apnea, and we were sharing her room. By night two, I was back to having sleepovers in the closet.

The pre-rehearsal brunch was in full swing downstairs. I was supposed to be seated next to the bride sometime ago, but I woke up in the closet and couldn't bring myself to leave it. Fully dressed in my pastel plum summer suit is how the bride found me. Staring out the window onto the sea of flower-ornamented chairs. It looked like a garden in the center of a cotton field; I knew it was her dream come true. I hated myself for how ugly I felt inside. In another universe, I go about all this the right way, but I was stuck here. It caused an unnatural anger within that frightened me to the core. She had startled me out of my deep thought and briefly asked how I was before berating me for not being present enough during this process. She broke down about all the guests, then proceeded to sob about a mishap in the kitchen where the wrong-colored plates were delivered and back to how I'm not being supportive enough and to not make this about my problems. When she rounded back to sobbing again, something broke inside me. It was like a fault line shift or a hairline fracture. I had never seen so clearly - in my existence - through such a jaded lens. And what spilled out my mouth were the universal truths.

I don't know why… I have always been able to keep it to myself. It isn't like it's not available to anyone who seeks it; it's just not easily handled by everyone. You only speak it unless asked; even then, it is only given if you are ready to receive it.

She wasn't ready.

I thought I was dreaming. Our relationship in every universe played out in a flashing scene until we converged into our summers in this closet. It all passed before us, growing from children to teens to adults as the room aged with us until we arrived together at this exact moment. I felt a wave of genuine reprieve to let it off my chest until I saw her face. It haunts me in every universe. As we stood in front of each other, surrounded by shelves of neatly folded sheets and towels in our matching pastel outfits. She could only speak with her eyes, and they begged me why, how, and what was happening. I couldn't process it; I didn't want to believe it. Her chest caved in as her face twisted, her limbs disintegrated with the gasping pop of an extinguished flame, and she disappeared within herself. This repeated itself in every universe.

I waited to wake up. I stood there until my best friend's mother entered the closet and asked if I'd seen her; she had wandered from the brunch crowd. Since I was also missing, they thought she had come looking for me. I couldn't speak. I shook my head, followed her mother out into the hall, down into the dining area, and waited to wake up. Waited for her to show up. When the cops came, everyone started to look at me strangely. I didn't know what to say, what to do. A coward lives inside me, and they desperately wished for it all to disappear. She became a cold case, and I never saw anyone from the wedding again. Years later I heard they were making a movie about her disappearance. I thought about auditioning for a part; I always wanted to be an actor.

"Hyperextended" is the word for consciously maintaining this many lifetimes in various dimensions. I still think of her face in my travels. When I'm distressed in parallel universes and want to ground myself. When I miss the linen closet and want to escape the reality that is my present. When I miss my career and fame, my children, my husbands, my best friends, and my grandmothers. It's a cheaters mentality and a lie that the grass is always greener in another world. It's roulette with universes, and they call it the Parallel Revolver.