Coming of Age

When I was a child, I guess I was innocent.  Or maybe ignorant.  I didn't know they were there, or how to spot them.  I didn't know what made them different from me.  The world was simple and colorful.  Green grass.  Black asphalt.  Brown bark.  Grey sewer pipes in the playground that I drew on with the bright red-black of berries until I scraped my fingers on the rough surface of the concrete.  Bright red blood that I would suck on because they stung.  Sweet berries.  Coppery blood.

The girl next to me drew a house.  The boy on the right, a stick figure portrait.  I drew a geometric glyph.  We used them to mark the tunnels for hide and seek, otherwise they all looked the same, and we got lost in the maze of grey identical pipes.  Inside and out, covered in red lines that turned black as they dried.

I don't know if I would rather go back to those days or not.  To when I didn't even know if the people I was playing with were...I don't even want to think about it.


It all changed when I was 13.  Out on the playground in middle school.  Recess.  White lines on black asphalt, marked for basketball, six hoops in three sets.  Tan dirt and brown grass at the edges trampled by many feet and tortured by the approaching summer heat.  A paved path cutting through the field like a black snake.  The sky was the color of blue reserved for cartoons and childhood memories, that perfect blend of robin's egg and Caribbean that we think doesn't exist in nature until we see it, and then it just stills and calms the heart.  It was powdered with clouds.  Enough to give it depth and a ceiling, but not enough to shade us from the bright hot mid-day sun.  That was probably why I was looking toward to pool across the field.  Fenced in and waiting, like a wrapped Christmas present, for after school let out.

The fissure opened in the middle of the air.  As though air was dense enough to be cut open from the other side like a soft foam-rubber substance and parted like a surgical incision.  It hung like a window, three or four feet tall, two or three feet wide, maybe six feet off the ground.  It was hard to guess at its dimensions, because once it was open, it seemed to grow bigger, while remaining the same size.

I stood, in the grass beside the blacktop, looking through a gash in the air.  And at the same time, I was on the other side of it; all the stars of the universe spread out before me like a moonless, cloudless night sky.  Free of horizons or distortions.  I was aware of all the space around me, behind, above and below, without ever turning.

It was terrifying.  It was amazing.  But there was something wrong there.  And as I watched, I saw people dying.  People on ships of metal and glass.

I ran to get a teacher.

When I got back, it was gone, but I told her what I had seen.

"Oh," she said, looking perturbed.  "You have such a great imagination," her smile looked forced at first, and she patted me on the arm.  I was already too tall for her to pat on the head.  "You should write your stories down."

Imagination?  Stories?!  It had been right there, and I had seen it!  Black sky like dried berries, like asphalt.  White stars like the hot sun.  Had no one else seen it?  The split in the sky?

No, I realized soon.  No one else had seen it.


Two years later, at a friend's birthday party, it happened again.  A basement with white walls and tan carpeting.  Golden cookies the size of my whole hand with pink frosting an inch thick and red sprinkles.  Slightly less than a dozen girls with a patchwork of sleeping bags across the floor.  My own was dark blue, with a stained, tannish green lining, somber amidst the colorful quilt, dug from the closet by my mother and having belonged to my father back when camping was something he still did.

The later it got, the more impatient the birthday girl got, insistent that we all stay up in spite of it being a "sleep" over, and quite late besides.  But this was usual.  It was exciting to be away from our parents, and hers were upstairs.  We could do whatever we wanted.

That's when the board games came out.  And she pulled out Ouiji with the smirk of someone intent on mischief.

"I just got this for my birthday from Mom," she said.  "It lets you talk to _ghosts_ and ask them questions."

Some of the girls looked sceptical, some frightened by the prospect.

I asked, "Which ones?"

"Oh, whichever ones you ask," she dismissed, setting the board up.  "Come on.  Everyone put your hands on.  If you're not chicken, that is."

Perhaps this is why they warn children against playing with Ouiji boards.  She asked to speak to her grandmother, who had passed away two years ago, and bid her answer if she was there.  

It really does feel, in the moment, like your hands are glued to the little plastic stylus.  And it does feel like it is moving itself, especially when you know you are not the one moving it.

This time, I ended up inside another person's body, looking out.  It was most certainly not her grandmother, because I had the clear sight of three fingered hands with skin neither blue nor green.  And I told them this.  And they started asking questions.

I don't remember what was asked, or what I said in response, but I do remember distinctly that it was unpleasant.  My mouth spewing words that were not my own, a desperate attempt to get a message out.  The frantic feeling of time running out.  The sensation of a body that I inhabited falling away from me--a cold, dead weight, into a dark nothingness.  But I floated higher and regained consciousness on a floor, surrounded by frightened and excited 15-year-old girls.  

My friend's mother blamed it on too much sugar and excitement, and too little sleep, as she called my mother to come pick me up.  She theorized that I had had some kind of seizure.  But there were 9 other girls there as hyper and sleep-deprived as I.  Of them, only one looked at me with eyes that understood.


I have learned with time to guide and harness the visions.  I can open the portal through time myself and fly like a spirit to a voice in need.  Heal the wound of a friend, in a time before he knew me, and understand finally why he found me familiar when we met.  I can speak with a voice that knows a deeper truth than any human mind, when asked the right questions.  I see colors drawn through the world like a child's glyphs on a concrete pipe-wall.  Bright red streaking through the air between the heads of the green pine trees.  White pillars glowing like distant stars rising from the ground and stretching up and up.  Crisp golden browns, shooting straight across the land only to be re-routed by a building carelessly tossed in its path.  Cool blues undulating and dancing like a ribbon on the wind, following the river through the woods.  Deep shadows in the blackness of the night, hiding the unknown and leaving only our imaginations to fill our minds with possible answers.

And I can also see Them all around me.  Their steps hollow, their eyes unseeing, like things dead.  Or maybe blind.  They do not see the colors of life because they are not alive.  But they do not hear the voices of the dead either.  They walk half alive, thinking they know all they need to.  See all that is there.

I can see that they have done to their souls to keep themselves dead-but-walking.  Blind to the world.  I have seen their eyes sewn shut, burned, clawed out.  I have seen their wings rent and torn, hacked off at the stumps and chained.  They cut out their hearts, and their spots of power, and they never let the wounds heal.  They can't even see what they have done to themselves anymore.  I wonder if they can even feel it anymore.  If they wake to the empty aching in the night and wonder what is missing.  If they even know what they have done.

But I can see it.  When they look at me from behind the designer shades that the magazines told them were "in" this season.  Their eyes are hollow, their smiles shallow.  If they remember how to smile at all.  If it's "in" to smile this season.  Their hands twisted and mangled, caked with their own blood under manicured nails and pristine suits, as they reach out to do business.  Mistaking me for one of them.  I don't usually correct them.

They are the ones who are called 'normal.'  And they are everywhere.