the things too weird to talk about
questioning strange events
Erik handed me a card today and told me to open it. It didn’t have a clear return address and was postmarked from Phoenix. He didn’t admit it at first, but he wanted to make sure it wasn’t from you and was relieved to instead see an invitation to his cousin’s bridal shower.
The shower is scheduled the same day as your birthday. But don’t worry, it’s not in Phoenix.
Sometimes, the coincidences are a little too uncanny for me to overlook. For a while, I wondered if I was being teased by your ghost and then I just wondered if I was losing my mind. Of course, it seemed natural to be reminded of you when I’d spent many months looking for signs of you. So when things seemed oddly coincidental, I’d tell myself it was just my mind playing tricks cause I’d been primed.
But there were instances that felt like such a stretch to rationalize as pure coincidence. The more I tried to ignore them, the more frequent and intense they’d become. Then came the apparitions. A few nights, I bumped my head on something that wasn’t there. Then there was the morning I had a vision. A lucid voice said, “there is an energy, and it will come for you like this,” as a chimera with a cat-like face appeared, stared into my eyes and pounced into me.
Initially, I wasn’t afraid. I’m no stranger to the experience of seemingly supernatural phenomena. And I’d learned to block them out the older I got. What made me start to waiver was the idea that I was suddenly one of those people… and I didn’t want to be one of those people. It had not even been a year since I sat on a so-called vortex in Sedona and mocked the idea of healing energies and people claiming to see auras. But here I was experiencing the ridiculous.
The waiver was the start of the crash, and things got really bad. I was in an uncontrollable spiral from bliss to hell and back again, like an 80 lb. kid trying to tame a flailing firehose. I wandered into the path of someone who helped me. It was a single arbitrary encounter. I don’t really know what to call him. But he recognized that my energy was all over the place and helped me temporarily re-center. I asked him if I was crazy. He belly-laughed, and said that it’s normal for some awakenings to be chaotic. But I’d need to meditate. And so I did.
The first time I sat, I felt my heart and chest as though it were encased in ice. The sensation was as real as any bodily input. Over the next months, I’d continue to randomly experience patches of extreme hot and cold in select areas around my body. But the crazy visions and unintentional OBEs soon subsided.
I somehow know this world isn’t all that it appears to be. It’s more like a filtered view of another reality our physical bodies don’t have the ability to sense. Time as we think of it is an illusion of sorts. But the mind fools us into thinking it’s experienced universally in the way the mind perceives it.
When I say I know, it’s not my mind that knows. Earlier this year, I became aware of something else I didn’t recognize before. I would say, it’s our soul. But you probably wouldn’t believe me or know what I was referring to. There aren’t really words to describe it and there’s no substitute for the recognition. Plus, you told me you don’t believe there’s an afterlife. What if I called it an outer-life, experiencing many lifetimes at once including the one you’re in now?
You did tell me on the couch that our connection felt spiritual. And you said you felt a warmth on the plane. I think I was similarly ignited, but the feeling was so bizarre and unknown to me that I tried to google the symptoms which sounded a lot like conventional love. But I wonder if I misdiagnosed it. And I wonder if you, being the pragmatist and skeptic that you are, assumed it was just a brain thing. I don’t know if you were joking when you said we were quantumly entangled. But it was eerie how much you knew what I was thinking, how much you knew about me. And then there was that strange sensation that we’d been together before and always.
I still sometimes question whether it was only me that felt those things, whether you made it all up thinking it was something I’d like to hear. I remembered how you said I was an easy read. That you had savant-like abilities to see into people. How you fibbed a lot at the beginning until it irked me and you switched to another tactic. And you tested me by seeing how much you could push me to do things I said I didn’t want to do. You love-bombed me for sure. But I don’t know if you were conscious of it. Maybe you were just repeating patterns you learned.
However you interpret it, I remember that even though you had these tendencies, it felt like I saw a level deeper into you. I knew you were an actor. And it really amused me. It amused me how you thought it mattered any difference who you think you are in this life.
I’m afraid to judge you. No matter how I rotate this tesseract of a mess I don’t feel confident that I understand what I’m seeing. And despite how any of it looks on the surface, I have so many doubts about drawing any conclusion from it. I still remember what it was like to see you and the world without judgment, to see what is as it is. It is a type of bliss that can’t be described. But to see with god eyes is a difficult state to maintain as a human.
Of course, Erik thinks I’m naive for not seeing the obvious. Perhaps I am delusional. It is lonely to be the only one who’s willing to consider that maybe something strange and misunderstood happened between us. Maybe you’ve considered it, too, but it is too weird to talk about.