Pick your poison mom had said to me over her shoulder as she mixed a salad for dinner in a red bowl on the small square of Formica counter space between the stainless steel sink and the opaque square of the microwave oven with its confusion of dials and buttons. I was sitting at the kitchen table and the grey slate of late afternoon November sky occupied the window above the sink. The same grey captured on the super 8 reels that Jo and I watched decades later on the wall of our apartment through the scuffed lens of a projector that we scavenged from an alley out back of an arts school. We would lay in bed and narrate the silent scenes of backyard hijinx captured in the damp autumn and snowy winter like we were a new breed of anthropologists from the future whose directive was to invent the past rather than merely document it. To take the evidence and introduce a mutation. Even then, sunk in our mattress, the smoke from our cigarettes curling within the vector of light from the projector, we began to override our histories and spring anew from our pasts. An illusion of freedom is still freedom Jo had said. | image by @pikchurmagazine