Free Sample

And here I thought I was you. Documenting as much of ourself as possible. Editing direct messages. Crafting exchanges in advance, planning ahead—a practice repurposed since we tuned-in our pockets. This is not paranoise but anxio-scrawldom. You send loss, you can do anything. Lie to whomever you want whenever you want. Plan your own demise. Brag about your empathy. Mobile order your next panic attack. Scroll the knife-edge of it all. You can be anyone. Hermit heard instantly, employee abroad. You can be a pin-drop ping, puddle gulp in sea, and I wouldn’t fault you, for I’m always me.

Seven when it dawned I was different. My father left behind little more than well-kept appliances and what’s more was a six-year-old curlyhair tarantula named Xenu. It didn’t start with humans, but with a spider.

In animalia, no part of me knows I’m Ivy. I am the subject. And though I’m well-versed in the perspectives of animals, I find the subjective details difficult to communicate. Early on, I tried to journal the readings, despite the words never mounting sense. I observe and interpret and react, but can only know those are the things I was doing once I’m human again. Perhaps it’s a function of neurons. While I’m actually it—being some thumbless, languageless body-mind—I simply am it. Pure instinct. Some unknowable fraction of the animal’s identity is lost, untranslatable or incomprehensible. The same is true of every animal I’ve read, to different degrees. Still I felt every cropped and passing minute.

Hunt—eat—rest—mate—birth—and on. Coming back the first time was a shock of third-eye glory so powerful as to be feared before revered before set as rubric against all my future dreams. Suddenly a thousand times larger I collapsed from what felt like miles above. Burned and smothered, or blank, my very senses a painful rearrangement, extremities somehow reduced, I found the word ‘clothes’ on me. Awareness clamors without beauty, until its sudden beauty, and this I learned a forgotten soul unspidered on a living room floor, watching myself scurry away under the couch.

If you ever return somewhere and hadn’t realized you were gone, do as a reader, as I learned to do that night, and put a thumb to each finger, lengthen and shorten and warm every muscle of your legs, your arms, ankles, wrists. Run your tongue around your teeth, your palms together. Do all of these things many times over and take a week of denial before you learn a bit.

On some late-summer ghost day of a school year the boys discovered an enormous ant pile behind one of the backstops and took to guarding it like the Secret Service. The pile the figurative center of the playground at Sam Houston Elementary School. You were to try to kick it and if you failed to get past Jason or Travis three times you would be banned until the following recess. It seemed an injustice. My sole wholehearted attempt at childhood friendship involved enlisting the other girls in a peaceful capture of the colony—not ‘pile.’ Alas, the brutal equalizer war; Kayla fulfilled the charge and signaled our triumph with a dramatic, full-force kick to the system. I fell to my knees and burst into tears. “You weren’t supposed to kick it!”

“But we won,” she said, confused. “That’s the rules.”

Thousands at martial speed, burrowing, a frenzy of trauma and repair. The kids laughed, left me alone, and in time I looked up to see a watery Mrs. Warner approaching and thought what use? How could I explain? I couldn’t go back to class. I was needed. There was civilization-wide turmoil to be ordered. Then earth gave one ant onto my hand which came to rest on my knuckle and everything around us went silent and I skimmed a finger over the ant’s tiny red surface and became my larval form. I remember very little of the rest of my day after returning, but I recall Mrs. Warner’s frightening pleasant smile as she said, “My, you’ve sorted out now, haven’t you?”

I read hundreds of animals en route to adulthood. I kept everything a secret, confederate in wordlessness with the immensity of life around me, duly mistaking myself periodically for a God. Fevered, in total worship of possibility, only rarely depressed in the aftermath, I sought animals and nothing else. I sought as though bouldering blind, feeling here and there for a grip to rise the curve of something vertical I knew beyond man’s making or measure but host to certain dynamics on those vertices which might prove humans the toughest intelligence to reach. In short order I read spiders, ants, crickets, roaches, ladybugs, centipedes, mice, squirrels, rats, little birds (oh, that good hour spent hand-on-injured-bird, first touch of one, awonder-whether until deep within my hollowing bones decision woke and I read and flew). Then came Madisonville. At a ranch owned by Mom’s first post-Dad boyfriend I met a great brown American Quarter Horse named Bulldozer. It was my first experience as a domesticated creature, since one wouldn’t call Xenu domesticated in the same respect. Bulldozer’s memories and sorrows remain with me now, forever raw. The loss of her mother, separation from a friend. She was no otherworldly blip or simple mind of instinct. With all the grandeur of the term, she was self-conscious. The return from Bulldozer revealed to me a profound new scale of time-warp. Xenu had been near my own age when I read her, and I reckoned my collection of garden and schoolground lifespans—fifty days as a cricket here, three years a centipede down there—together amounted to an age far beyond that of my own mother. But there are pretty distinct psychic levels of matriculation in these studies, some more shocking than others. Beware an early lesson from odd-toed ungulata. Having lived a consecutive sixteen years under the mane, within the human markers of time and industry, one is commanded upon return to a state that can only be described as hyper ego-death. Picture a lonely little ten-year-old atop a mare, suddenly herself, perspective freewheeling, splintered, as if she’s just come up from a thousand micrograms of L.S.D. For a hairsplice of a moment there she’s Buddha in the grove, she’s a king in Jerusalem realizing meaningless ecstasy. What kid wouldn’t keep going? At the ranch were a thousand heads of cattle, but I was bored by the idea of a life fattened for slaughter. This from a kid with memories of hunt and flight, fangs sunk into small creatures, liquefaction. I read another horse. I read a pig and some wild rabbits. It was the longest spring break of my life and still wasn’t enough. Thus from Kayla’s Bombay, Bliss, a dozen other house cats. Then any dog I could get my hands on.

Somewhere along the way, even ageless from the cats and dogs and horses, I understood I was not special. Not even with the prophetlike sensation of total cleansing focus that occurred after each reading, and not as that sensation increased with each newly entered clade. Not even because of the power itself was I special. I was just different. I would’ve been special if I could’ve maintained true, marrow-deep empathy with anyone. No matter my gift, I couldn’t. At the end of the day, quite literally, I was always me. What did I know? I had known not woman or man, nor cactus, vine, or flower. The idea of limits begrudged me a childish anxiety. In animalia, limitation was nary a concern, just an unquestioned reality, but for a little girl privy to unspeakable mystery, limitation was death. I wanted in myself the presence and acceptance I knew to be available to living beings. It’s true that, as people, language gets in our way, but the difference is more than that. Forgiveness, peace, unattachment—these are not human mindsets, they are natures. They are valves within the soul, opened only with patience and work.

Nevertheless, I was obsessed. By twelve I spent every free moment in the biology section of the library or prowling fields and parks for life. I had been annelids and arthropods, some gastropods, but my obsession narrowed to chordates, particularly vertebrates with closed cardiovascular systems. There was, understandably, an enchanting familiarity about such a body. In the meantime, teachers admired my interests, admonished my seclusion. My mother for years strove to socialize me before puberty, but at some point resolved herself to my character and my apparent happiness. Through middle school I persisted in methodical collection of specimen experience, pursuing the classification branches toward humanity as much as possible, but just as happily becoming a frog or butterfly. Happiest as a dog or cat.

In reality, I did spend a healthy amount of time with other girls my age, but my friendships were few, and fluid. I was quiet in most conversations. Where others could offer jokes and gossip, I offered eerily accurate mimicry of everybody’s family pets. I wanted to talk about reincarnation instead of church, snakeskin instead of boys’ hair, but with so much time to kill until adulthood, no money, still little agency, I conformed when I could, tried to blend into the background wearing zebra print and listening to pop. By twelve I was that girl doing yoga in the trees behind the bike racks, the daughter who studied TV coverage of 9/11 to understand how New York’s birds had acted and reacted.

Though a teacher proud of her only child’s academic pursuits, Mom was relieved when I found myself a secondary passion which might be more social in result than biological fieldwork. It was an interest I discovered gradually. With a cursed gift like mine, one has many kinds of days. Of study, the pre-read days of dreadful excitement and anticipatory malaise. Days of post-read euphoria. But also, necessarily, distracted days of self-reorientation—the yoga, meditation, the stretching, tapping of fingertips, long gazes into an elusive reflection, and the most surprising sound of all registering as the resonance of my actual voice in my actual skull.

I took to singing.

Impressions of birdsong and cat purrs, not to mention a million foreign memories, had nurtured in me the acute talent to control my own voice. I made up songs in the shower, harmonized to the radio. By ear I could copy the melody and texture of almost any music I heard, with my voice, with the keys of Mom’s ancient electric keyboard.

This in turn motivated Mom again to get me socialized in a normal way. She harangued me the summer before eighth grade until I relented and changed my class elective from Art (a path which had produced sketchpads full of animal drawings, but little creativity and less collaboration) to Choir. Indeed, not only did my new interest allow for a diversified social life, it became one of my most trusted tools for maintaining presence in my own body, before or after a reading. I sang because my identity depended on it.

Adolescence rang of Björk and Radiohead, Sam Cooke, Nina Simone, Amy Winehouse. By high school my shallow conformity in taste and appearance had drained some and I found myself with the awkward teenage realization of a personality all my own. Bicycle girl. Park girl. Girl whose mind and very spirit exhibited peculiar complements to those of the old and dying. She doesn’t seem bothered by the time or the pressures of a scheduled existence. She doesn’t go to church and says she prays to animals. She still goes to petting zoos, for Christ’s sake.

I wasn’t a complete loner. The Mormon girls liked me because they considered me basically pious. It is difficult to be an outcast amongst theatre kids, too. I earned minor cachet among the skaters, the ravers, the orchestra kids, and some faculty. But there was a facilitating irony there, for to be maturely detached from others at that age with such idiosyncrasy invites the attention of other teenagers, and then prompts their exhaustion, and so engenders a relationship to one’s peers rarely deeper than respectable acquaintanceship. As a teen I had a self-assured spiritual arrogance at odds with the southern Christian parents of outer Houston. I had an animalistic bent to all my metaphors and advice occasionally unsettling to classmates, a blunt perspective on life/birth/death more befitting a pessimist philosopher than a biologist, and few pleasant social skills. Of course I couldn’t just admit I was a teenager. I blamed it on the roaches. The snakes. Abusive dog owners. I blamed it on my mom in what was to her a predictable hormonal manner. I blamed the nightmares—fleeing a predator, injuring my wings. But I never, not once, considered blaming the power itself. To the contrary, I resolved to revive my use of the power in accordance with the examples set by Xenu and Bulldozer and Bliss. There must be a purpose to the readings, I reminded myself. Purpose in selection, lessons unearthed. After all, who wouldn’t fantasize about reading great apes, dolphins, whales? Trees, fungi, mold could be next. Was it only animalia? When could I know another person, really know them?

Ecstatic meaninglessness is as neutral as it sounds. I couldn’t bear it to be for nothing. All the secret decades. All the colored pencils used to the stub rendering my goal of the month, the ruby-throated hummingbirds, the Great Danes. I had knelt beside creeks straining eyes against the dusk more evenings than I wanted to count. I lost my virginity as a spider, as a girl on a date with a horse breeder’s son. It couldn’t be for nothing.

Adulthood implied humans. Other people, no way around it. Them. But if it was to be a conscious choice, what then? Surely I had a choice. I had felt the churn in the stomach, the sickly day-of awareness, the need to defeat the feeling and my ensuing decisions—go for a bike ride, go to the creek—which caused encounters that led to a reading, a surprise Bufo marinus, Aedes sollicitans. But I had chosen them, surely. It was I who leaned down and observed. I who calmed, cajoled. I seduced a hundred beings, three hundred, got near them, in their business, I who sleepily used them for a glimpse of that ecstasy. If this curse were to reach its natural conclusion, I’d damn sure want a say in what kind of human lives I’d live.

I knew I was different, but not for the breath of me could I guess what the inner lives of other people would be like. Yet I knew the point. Empathy. The goal of all good art and science and government. A dictate of worship, empathy. This whole putting yourself in other people’s shoes bit, there’s a reason we muse on it so much. Still, what horror, what overbearing rapture could one receive upon the return from a separate human mind? What would the other person feel? The dogs, cats, many of my later reads had felt a vague curious surrender in the lead up to my decisive touch. Would these people be submitting, does free will have a role for either them or me? And how might one react in a fresh human body, anyway? I might lose my mind in a food court somewhere, shouting, “You have my face, you have my body!”

First, I considered ages. Child, peer, adult? I’d been a child myself and in each human life would begin as one. That option felt lacking. Besides, would I have the vocabulary of the kid in those first post-read moments, my childlike wonder setting off alarm bells for anyone around? I didn’t know any kids apart from the annoying little siblings of some classmates. So then a classmate? But I knew them already and feared every context imagined. It was a big school, I didn’t know everybody, but why waste my first (and perhaps, if too psychologically damaging, my last) experience as another person on one as homebound and young as I?

My entire conception of human reality just wasn’t cutting it. Call it my first spiritual crisis. I had inherited agnosticism from Mom, found Krishna and Buddha in the book stacks, and grown up square in Jesus country, but I could only venerate the readings, the returns. Moreover, I knew less about those than Christians knew of the Bible or atheists their philosophies. Had no creeds, no codes, no sense of math or history or sociology. Just a sense of wonder. An insight, a collection, yes, but no proofs, no applications. If I wanted to experience another soul’s slice of God-given cognition, another person’s philosophy of mind, it behooved me to gain confidence in my own, beforehand.

Houston is a religious city. And though as a teen I wasn’t always seeking religious advice, in America, such advice presents itself rain, hail, or sunshine. The Bayou City is a place of megachurches, Vietnamese Buddhist temples, a vibrant Mormon stake, Hindu temples, much more. Our religious infrastructure might break down as 60% Protestant megachurches, 15% Catholic churches, 12% small Protestant churches, 7% spaces for literally every other religion and non-affiliation, 3% gas stations, 2% guns, and 1% brisket. Between the other most populous cities in the U.S. it’s no contest for Christians until you get to San Antonio. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago—they have their histories, they have New Testament God-fearing folk, but everything’s bigger in Texas. During this latter-adolescent spiritual search of mine, Corbin Allen’s Riverbed Church bought a basketball stadium near Rice Village and set up the largest congregation in the nation. Where The Who and Cyndi Lauper once preached now came a big Texan grin telling us to believe in ourselves, asking for donations. I visited Riverbed twice, mesmerized but dismayed. It called to mind the one time I followed a friend to a summer Bible camp. I went for the zip-line, but a handsy counselor insisted on having me saved by Jesus. I wept, thinking that’s what I was supposed to do. There was no God for me there, except what I felt after reading one of the campground Tabbies. The bad rock music and American flags, the lights, the production of it had sickened me, more offensive to my artistic pride than any latent religious inclination. The same artifice turned me off of Allen, despite his horror-movie handsomeness. He seemed less pastor and person than embodiment of cash-fisted Christianishness. Similar and smaller churches I biked to on Sundays left me equally unfulfilled. During my senior year of high school, I frequented the Rothko Chapel and Vietnamese monks, spiritual swindlers, palm readers, mediums, and even once visited a Scientology clinic. I spent far too much of my theatre camp counselor wages on this stuff, and in my quest for human enlightenment I went an entire year without reading an animal. Thoreau, Austen, Nietzsche, Marx and Smith, Darwin, Camus, de Beauvoir, Dickens, Arendt, Sontag. The scene kid poetry in English class. The Texan backdrops of No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. I sought not just guidance but explanation, and I read and watched, but never enough, never everything, permitting canons patriarchal or progressive, never getting the whole story, never knowing what common creed might exist beneath the apocalyptic clash-of-values in the American psychoscape. Then back to the east, to Jaynism and fasting. To the I Ching when in doubt, to the Holy Quran, to Rumi, to the Japanese poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Secluded again. Back to America, to Alice Walker and Langston Hughes.

If I have made excuses for the tendency to seclusion in my early childhood, I submit none for resuming the habit in my final months of high school. I was a recluse when not at school or the local community theatre. My circle of friends included no more than study groups, carpoolers, some of the theatre tech kids during show season. These relationships existed mostly online. The internet in 2008, what a trip. AIM lingering on, Facebook Chat arriving to dominate. The world in our pocket. The perfect tool with which to simultaneously hide from and engage others. I hid, but chatted. I told myself this was part of the process of taming my impulses, those to read, to escape myself. But it was another manifestation of them, because I was still secluding myself for the God of Reading’s sake. Instead of knowing people, I was studying them.

But I tried. I was an anxious, self-obsessed wallflower, but I laughed, joked, had crushes. And I would think participation in the theatre and science departments kept me from total existential dread. I wasn’t morose, though kids could perceive me that way. I was just intensely preoccupied such that other kids presumed a social condition, and suburban Christian moms presumed me a lesbian. The latter presumption I wouldn’t refute. I didn’t know. My sexuality was quite diffuse because of the llama sex and whatnot. My sociability however was flourishing precisely because of the readings—my deepest relationships, other species.

We had pets beside Xenu. By the time I was eighteen we were caring for our second cat. Mom had named her at my insistence as I had named the cat who died a few months before, Milk, an A+ black and white cow cat, loving little creature. I loved her and our next gal, Cassandra, loved them like family. So I didn't read either of them. It was for love I didn’t ever tell my mom about the readings. Better she be spared further doubts, thoughts of her only child on the cusp of schizophrenia. In the early years I hid it from her with selfish, private awe. In later years with a dollop of mercy. If I were to go crazy after reading my first person, my explanations then would be meaningless, yet were I to tell her everything ahead of time, all at once, in the dusk of my second decade, then she might go crazy, blame herself, and never let me leave.

Eighteen-year-old Ivy Qualiana was not the greatest predictor of human behavior.

Mom would’ve gladly accepted an empty nest—as a high school English teacher she was around teens all day—but while graduation neared I did absolutely nothing to prepare for my future. That is, my future as other people saw it: college, career, family. I remained preoccupied. Mom and I tacitly agreed I could continue to live with her in my adulthood so long as I kept a job and contributed to the mortgage. She always hid some guilt about never remarrying and raising me alone, unable to afford much, and she probably knew I was unable to focus on providing for myself in the very real life soon approaching. She did urge on me the SAT, the ACT, college brochures, applications. At one juncture she suggested I get work on the cruise ships like many Houston thespians did. Finally over Papa John’s one night she practically shouted, “Just become a monk or a nun or something!” I think we both got some clarity as that landed. I was suited for some kind of cloistering, the work of enlightenment in search for the human heart. She could innocently leave me be and start her second life.

As it happened, people came to me, not I to them. There was still an aspect of mutual gravitation, as there forever faintly would be, but with my first, as the current surged between our colliding selves, the power didn’t wait for me, didn’t consult my agency until it was too late. And I was born again.

Here’s how it works. Over a few days I fall gradually exhausted, often sleeping but also often in a trancelike state. If there are people in the course of my days, and there always are, I latch onto them immediately. My brain wiry and seeking relief projects a false deep connection with others for the first moments of interaction, then I feverishly discard interaction and opt for solitude and sleep. Then one of those days, the third fifth seventh (how long can you go without meeting someone?) I meet someone, or hear a voice I know, and enough is enough and there’s a touch of vulnerability from both of us and we touch and it’s more certain if I want to do it but there’s gravitation involved I swear. There’s a degree of fate. And I give in anyway. I usually want it. I know it will be relief because I know I’m not myself. So I’m born again. A person’s entire life experience, every lost beat and sunk memory, from but the one perspective, unaware of my true identity right up until our moment of contact. The same way it works with animals, except for the extent of my exhaustion in the preceding days, except the preceding days of unease in the lives of the subjects. The scale of this, the age of another soul in another memory? Though I am its witness, even I cannot fathom it. The return is too blinding. Nowadays, I lose a few minutes. That first time, I lost the whole day.

My first was my biology teacher from sophomore year. Under thirty in 2008 and metamorphosed from punk rocker to Biology Club Sponsor, Dolores Dodge was the coolest teacher at my high school. Since I’d left her classroom as a student I’d spent two years returning to it for lunch and after-school Biology Club meetings. She was nearer to our age than most of the faculty, and as such became many a geeky teen’s conduit to adulthood, her humor and gossip always reservedly parallel to ours. She liked me. I loved her favorite science and I appeared to speak more with her than anyone else, including the drama teachers and the cast members of each musical. She advised me to pursue laboratory research. She lent me her ragged copy of Silent Spring. I didn’t think too hard about whether I wanted to read her, but one afternoon toward the end of senior year, after a lunchtime conversation in which she told me she was moving to another state and I told her I wasn’t going to college, with tears in her eyes she spread her arms out for a hug.

Imagine you’ve come to know yourself as Dolores Dodge. Head, shoulders, knees and toes Dolly’s. You grow up the eldest of three kids in a comfortable Dallas suburb. You like soccer and gardening and in your early teen years you develop a dependency on punk rock. You start a band decent enough to make it to Warped Tour ’99. You oscillate between modes of artistry and economy. You investigate the deepest recesses of your psyche in order to produce a memorable lyric, a radio-caliber hook, even as you pursue an associate’s degree, then a bachelor’s. Science and music, the science of music, the tones and tremors of art that lurk deep within the scientific method. You fall in love at age seventeen, and roughly out of it only two years later. Your cousin overdoses on his birthday and you read out the lyrics to his favorite Harry Nilsson song at his burial. Your dad suffers through then beats lung cancer. You keep smoking. Lungs, blood, heart. You are Dolores and no one else, but you are many versions of Dolores, the angsty teen, the practical young woman. The punk with close-cropped hair who puts down her axe at twenty-four to become a high school science teacher. You fall into love and out of it again. How many days have there been in your quarter of a life? How many days more? Imagine you’re absolutely wrecked by this new version of yourself. Long hours, scant pay, no recognition except from a few enthusiastic students. It’s not uncommon for you to wake up in a cold sweat simply because you were dreaming about going to work. Maybe you’re just a shitty teacher. Anyway an idea gnaws at your brainstem for a solid two years. The return to your True Self. The songwriter, poet. Enough with the Punnet squares and Latinate turns of phrase. Enough is enough, and despite the gut-emptying nervousness this decision imbues, to change careers yet again, to find some goddamn meaning in your little life, enough is enough and you know it’s time and the only person you’re actually nervous to tell is this one student, this one girl who seemed to respect your efforts in the classroom. She’s just a teen, telling her is nothing special. But you are becoming who you were always meant to be. You are leaving your family in Texas and your teacher friends and whatever career ladder you were on. There is no truth, no purpose, except this idea in your head and your sinking stomach and your tingling arms. No truth except this hug and what a startling truth it is.

And then you’re me again.  Some twenty-nine years older in the mind, but only milliseconds removed.

Though when I came to, that first return, I was hours removed. I was looking at the front of our condo, Cassandra licking herself in the window. It was almost ten at night. Later I reconstructed the intervening hours and learned that after abruptly leaving Ms. Dodge’s room, I wandered the halls of the school with a gloss of rapture on my face. Other kids thought I was rolling. I missed the second half of the day, apparently spending much of my time in the bathroom, staring at my new reflection. Where exactly I went and what exactly I did in the hours before my sudden awareness on our front lawn, I don’t know. But I remember a permanent smile. I remember my own wide eyes. Leaves and dreams of the lives of trees. Concrete meeting grass, this I focused on, not the image itself, but the image as it refracted off two old familiar eyes. I remember moving through the world as though floating, two ghosts in one forgotten body.

Once shared a hotel wall with a guy for a week and that was sufficient. Of course neighbors. Coworkers. Dates. A talkative stranger. It’s a hug. Sometimes a handshake. Hand on knee. Fingers running through hair, I’m pretty sure I didn’t dream that one.

Am I more empathetic because of all this? Yes. Am I any less biased? That’s doubtful.

After high school I worked at a pharmacy, at theatre camp some more, and at a movie theater. Time moved very slowly for me between the ages of eighteen and twenty. I wanted to read the population of Houston in its own proportions, an arbitrary endeavor perhaps, but it seemed logical. I wanted to map the religious attitudes of the city, the backwater atheism, and from every angle I desired to participate in our local economy. I objectified demography. All for God. Or the lack of God. And the lack of God it turned out to be, for I lost him somewhere along the way, the population itself fragmented, and I continued to worship only my readings. The people. Houston. One every couple months, then one every month, some bi-weekly binges, breaks for weeks, then relapse and relapse. Building up a tolerance, so to say. I’d return to myself and whichever dead-end job. I’d sing in my car, do sirens and trills, belt, all to denote me to myself. By twenty I’d spent seventy years homeless and twenty-five as a high-end chef, I’d lived in Australia and Boise and along the entire arc of the Gulf of Mexico and a few dozen other places. And yes, quite naturally, the return from a life as a different gender or race was intense. Incomprehensibly unsettling. It always felt like a kind of betrayal. But who was being betrayed and how was beyond us. Seriously, us, which it was for a moment. There was always right at the end some shared moment of awareness—two minds intertwined. That momentary joining and separation somehow made the reversal, the betrayal, easier to stomach. But then I was me again, tunnelvisioned ol' me. Any less bias, any less prejudice? Understanding something or someone tends to reveal more unknowns. So I hoped that the long-term accrual of those brief moments might beget a deeper knowledge outside of them. And I wrote on my palms with chewed up Bic pens: You Are Only One, UR1, UR1, Just A Dream, Ivy Only.

At twenty, desperately needing to feel anything other than self-pity, or perhaps needing the sorrow and self-pity of others, I left Houston for nowhere and lost myself. A vagabond of character, I read person after person in city after city after town. Read them, loved them, left them. I went along every spectrum the American road exposed, was a cowgirl, playboy, operative, cash-fiend, Type A, Type B, Type Without A Cause, proud to know Victims of Circumstance, Workers, Slippers, Risers, Triggers. I was impoverished, lavished, ravaged, homely, comely, lucky, sad, simple. Maybe I was searching for a generalization.

There were no outliers because there was no consistency. I had wanted to be able to say There are five kinds of people in this world, etc. But there are seven billion kinds, there’s One kind. Perhaps my story should be one of race or gender or institutions, tensions systemic, but it’s a story of God and suicide, the things individual. To wit, the only story I can write with any authority or relevance is what follows, and it’s pretty white and male and zealous since that’s how it happened to me. At one time I had wanted to find the fundamental, non-stereotypical, articulable difference between the minds of men and the minds of women, but found instead that such a search was beside the point, since true of residents animalia every person navigates existence on the same premise, the id, and the rest is personal. I wanted to confirm that everyone has secret sin, and we do, but secrets cannot define us where actions can. Everybody shares with their fellow humans as many qualities as they possess distinctly, or at least it feels so, and beyond that, if that, generalizations fail. Unfortunately to accept this took me years of body and centuries of mind. My two indulgent months in Las Vegas stretched over eight hundred years.

Morbidly Unhinged Omnisexual Borderline Amnesiac Addict Hypochondriac Marxist Graphic Designer Buddhist Sikh Tattooed Mormon Day-Trader Eagle Scout Marlboro-smoking Anti-smoking Activist Lawyer Thief Priest Dissident you fucking name it. I believed in every god, but didn’t. I saw the world, but preferred my own. Me myself at the end of the day, at the end of the day. What day is it? What’s my schedule, I’ve forgotten my real job. I pray to a nameless god in the east. Fast. Sing proud. Repeat your name. My name. I believed in Meyers Briggs and the Enneagram and didn’t. I believed in Theories of Self and of Mind and in Groupthink and Love Languages and Types A and B, Cliques and Factions and Seniority, and I didn’t. I did believe in things systemic. I also believed everyone’s a world, a massive population of versions of themselves, but I didn’t know what to do about it. So I grew cynical.

At twenty-five I accidentally read a vicious pedophile and got thoroughly freaked out and stopped for a while, then relapsed on time to flush the memory with an entire biker gang over the course of a month. It was getting ridiculous. It was time to go back home. Home: but a fractal cringe of memories aglow by street and stage lights, Texas sun. I had only regrets to visit beside my mom. I had no money, no job, and as résumé only a list of phone numbers connecting forgetful vouchers of brief gigs past. If anything I was a musician but I don’t think I ever answered the question and don’t remember who asked. People open up to you if you let them.

I took my time getting back. Meet someone in a library, a restaurant, better a park or theater. Who was I looking for? People with stories. Fun people. Extroverts. Introverts who might be secretly brilliant. People who surely have great sex lives. Those with fascinating or horrendously fascinating families. Those in politics, news, finance. The rich. Then, in turn, out of guilt, those beneath the overpass. Many bartenders, hairdressers, mechanics. I suppose, in the back of my mind, I considered searching for someone who could do what I could. Took my time trying to prove I was the only one who could do this, but with what sample size could one prove that?

Mom put me up for a while. I had a habit of slowly filling and quickly draining reservoirs of cash and credit problematic enough that by the time I tired of the road it was clear for stability’s sake and sanity’s I needed a steady job or a plot of land to till. Happenstance—a throaty, spendthrift neighbor—made me a vocal coach. Contacts grew, project became hobby became life. Soon I got my own place and something resembling a career. Maybe I didn’t materially understand things any better than when I had left Houston, but I was, for lack of a better term, sober. Hadn’t read anyone since December 31, 2015.

Then in May I met Corbin Allen.

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