Past Lives

Past Lives

I am an ordinary girl living in an ordinary place who dreams of extraordinary times.

I dream of being a pioneer in the frontier. The wild west I learned about in my fourth grade class, the trail I virtually walked in an online simulation. I imagine the bouncing of the wagon, the wide open skies. I can feel my anticipation at heading west, at the new life that awaited me and my family. I wish I could be the elegant wife of the owner of a silver mine. Living in an elegant mansion drinking fine tea out of fine china. I would wear thin dresses made of fine, touchable silk. My husband would order me lace and a dressmaker from the dusty town down the road, a wife of a miner who worked in the mine of my husband, would attach the lace, as delicate and intricate as a spider’s web, to those thin silk dresses. I would drink fine liquor, eat fine meals, and wear complicated and feminine hairstyles to the opera in Central City. I would have a coach and a driver, and life would be good and fine and wealthy.

In truth, if I were to really be a pioneer I would be a simple girl, arranged to marry a simple farm boy with ambition. We would pack our wagon, my 3 plain dresses and the one fine dress for Christmas packed into the trunk my mother received on her wedding day and passed down to me. The weathered candlesticks that my husband received from his mother would be wrapped in the handkerchiefs that I stitched myself, in the long dark days of boredom living in a two-bedroom home with one big bed for my parents and another big bed for me and my siblings to wrestle around in each night. By the light of a candle and a crackling fireplace I would stitch those quilts and handkerchiefs. Life would be simple, but I would still dream.

I would dream the dreams of a pioneer woman. Of big skies, and clear water. Of excitement, and the hope that accompanied the promise of a new world. Of the fear of the unknown that existed out in the waving grasses, and the blue skies of the west. In my past life as a pioneer, I would have the same adventurous spirit, the same big heart, and the same creative soul. I would not be the elegant wife of a rich man, I would be something better. I would be the strong and stubborn companion to a kind man in a wild place.

I dream of being a ballerina or an opera singer, on the stage in New York in the early 1900s. It is an era of fantasy in my mind. I make-believe of opulence and extravagance. In my mind’s eye I see a small apartment, shared with a beautiful woman and me. In that small bohemian place we dream and dance. The money we make is mostly spent on the rent to a boisterous and occasionally cruel landlord, and the rest is spent on clothes and makeup and false jewels bought from carpets at loud and bustling marketplaces. Her and I walk arm in arm through the angry streets of New York in evening gowns at noon on a tuesday. We walk to the opera where we sing and dance on stage as chorus girls, and to the ballet where we wear our cardboard shoes and dance in uniform lines. When the show is over we disappear into the rowdy crowds. Not the Gatsby crowds of wealth and fortune, but the city crowds that gather in too tight spaces with no regulations and no care. The third class bunkers on the Titanic, a rowdy break from the rigid conformity and the delicate melodies of the opera and the ballet. We swing each other around in our costumes and our feathers and our rhinestones. 

I dream of being an Old Hollywood starlet. In this life I am not ordinary. This is the time my dreams run wild. I am a pale faced beauty with vampy lips and dewey eyelashes. I am the world best performer, the most beautiful actress. I stamp my hands into the sidewalk and pose for pictures on the covers of magazines. I am a star, glamorous and refined.

But I am that pioneer too, and the poor unacknowledged dancer on the chorus line. And I leave Hollywood when the men become too much. When they become too cruel and too demanding. I take my beauty and my talent and I say no, and I leave. I leave once again for New York City, in the years when Marilyn Monroe was there. And like her, I live in a simple brownstone and wear elegant tailored clothing, and I learn about beauty from simpler people. And perhaps I leave again, to someplace far off and far away, when I realize that there is more to the world than controlling men, and white talented faces. 

In this life I am a star, after the years of toil on the prairie, and the suffering in the cramped and dirty spaces of the concrete jungle. In this life I am alone, and I am humbled. More so than in any life past. Throughout the conformity of the 50s, I find a way to come into my own identity, and become a part of building up the identity of the others.

So in that way, blooms my dream of the 90s. A stubborn and fiery groupie. Moodily sitting a top of a speaker in a dim and smokey basement. Outrageous and angry but kind and involved. A mover and shaker in the new protests and policies of the era, a frightening face on the front page of papers, a speaker and an activist in a strange new age. Alive from knowing the difficulties of the west, with its wide waving grasses and its strange new dangers. Alive from the crowded smokey bars dressed up in feathers and hope, holding the hand of my lover who to the rest of the world is but a chorus girl too. Alive from the star studded 50s, the dismissal of fame and fortune, and the humbleness of an era of problematic prejudices and cruel conformity. Now alive and wearing pants and metal and nothing but black and discovering once again a new world, and being at the controversial and ever changing epicenter of it.

And falling now into my current dream, of life as a woman living in a small townhome, studying an uncertain degree in uncertain times. Feeling the calls of all her past lives bubbling up inside her as she realizes now is the time to act as she has in all her lives past. Now is the time to be bold and adventurous, to be thrilling and risky, to be humbled, to fight. 

These eras of my imagination, all falling into the reality of this present moment.