To give you a scope of this, how vast and endless it is, I tell a story of a man I was love with and he with me. Engaged to be married, we traveled to meet his family over the holiday season where I was kicked out of house for being a “nigger”. The exact words were, “I told you not to bring that nigger to my house.”

You may imagine my confusion and various other sundries over that, but regardless of what you make it, the next day I took this man (and his brother) to the Vietnam Memorial.

I felt I had to do this because they had (have) a brother who was MIA and while they would travel home to this area (the sister lived in D.C.) each year for Christmas they would avoid visiting the memorial – they just couldn’t bring themselves to go there.

My fiance was haunted though. He spoke of his brother frequently and I’d begun to dream him. The dreams were very specific – I saw his helicopter go down and in the worst of them, I was in the helicopter with him and I knew he was dead.

I mean, I thought he was dead but you just couldn’t say this in this family. I did say it of course, that is how I found out you couldn’t say it because the mother – well the soldier was her first born son and she just could not deal with the idea he was dead even after all this time had passed.

If deference to the mother’s grief, the other two sons suspended their realities around their brother’s fate but as I said, it was grating on my fiance. I’d go as far as to say he was coming unglued or a better word would be, he was undermined by this. He was haunted and so was I by osmosis.

In whatever case, we (me, my fiance and this brother aka the 3 Amigos) flew east. We had this N-word thing go down and the next day we went to the memorial which is day etched in my mind.

I really don’t think it went very well though I couldn’t tell you for sure. My guess is it did not go well and the fact I was there and don’t know ought to tell you it was pretty blurry.

I did marry and I did divorce and I did stop dreaming of the helicopter but when I look back on this I have no idea what I was doing. I don’t know if it was good, if it was bad, if going there was a service or if I actually sacrificed the brothers. I just don’t know.

They may have sacrificed me by taking me to their father’s house to be kicked out onto the lawn due my coloring seeing as they were aware of his feelings. I don’t see that there is anyway to tell. And now I am married to the soldier who has crashed in a helicopter in the middle of a war, not once but twice.

He’s mentioned the sick feeling when you’re going down, spiraling down and you think you’re going to die and of course I know it because I have dreamed it and I have those kind of dreams where you get moved around.

Nightmares, I mean because I never get to fly in my dreams but I do get in car accidents. I do get flung around, beaten, slammed into things and I do go down in helicopters where you’re spinning and your stomach comes up in your throat and you feel the jarring impact when you hit.

What I am saying is I saw the brother was dead. He was right there when we crashed in my dream and I thought I was supposed to convey this to his brother so he could heal so I set about to do that. As if that is even possible because I don’t see that it is.

If a person wants to deny something they are going to be able to do it and whose says my dream is right and his fantasy or imagination, wrong?

And then the soldier starts talking about crashing in a helicopter and unbeknownst to him, I leave my body but I don’t even know where I go when that happens… or why.

See all the lines here? There are no lines here.

I don’t know why people hate me or call me a nigger. I also don’t know why they love me or even if they love me, really because it may be a trick. There is always a hall of mirrors, always.

I also know this aspect delivers incredible bliss. It also delivers pain that is exquisite and in between the two poles, things are beyond blurred.

Brownsville Girl by Bob Dylan is probably my favorite song of all time – in the top 5 anyway and in it he says, “Now I’ve always been the kind of person that doesn’t like to trespass but sometimes you just find yourself over the line…”

I know that feeling and I know it well. I really mean to be in the right place all the time but I drift and I can’t see there is a way to stop it.

Matter of fact, that would be a good epitaph for me, ‘She was over the line.”