Imagine #9

I had recently begun to envision driving off of every bridge my poor old Chevy found itself having to ramble over. Alice Cooper was blasting in my ears,

I´m eighteen
And I don´t know what I want
Eighteen
I just don´t know what I want
Eighteen
I gotta get away
Eighteen
I gotta get out of this place
I´ll go runnin´ in outer space
Oh yeah.

I didn't really want to die, but had failed in the ability to think of ways to get by. Nobody ever understood a thing I did or said. With my dyed black hair, long legs that never fit in their jeans, and mixed up dyslexic thought processes, I was definitely not your normal young woman. Considering myself a freak of nature, I began to isolate even more than usual, coming to the conclusion that death must be the only solution; the last avenue yet untraveled. I had always entertained the idea of just disappearing from the world, starting when I was a child and sat in a ditch for a whole afternoon and nobody came to find me. It was the same thing--nobody cared if I lived or died. My mother told me I was ugly, my father was long gone. I was coming close to another bridge and felt my fingers tighten over the steering wheel in anticipation. Then I heard a very warm sounding voice on the radio sing, "Imagine there's no heaven . . ."

My mind clicked open.

I knew that voice, but had always been told he was a bad person because of his weird and sometimes rebellious ways. "You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one." The words went straight through every negative thought I possessed and calmed down their urgency. Was he saying it was okay to be different? To dream, to be weird? All of a sudden, I felt myself breathe. The car passed over the bridge with me stuck in a sudden enrapture.

That was the beginning of the journey and the day I stopped dying. From then on I knew there was a spot in the world that belonged to me. A young woman was no longer alone.