the dead

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Q: Why are you cosmically connected to rock stars? Why isn’t it like…Bob from accounting.

 

A: Right?  I know.  Trust me, it bothers me.

My first thought is that it’s to keep me quiet.  Because the minute you mention a famous name, people start to doubt you.  The first time I told the story online, I changed the names of everyone (like I did here), so people would just read the story and not start a “fact-checking session.”  I just needed to get those words out somewhere, to explain what I’d just survived.  Here I did it for legal reasons, because the site is public, searchable, and the last thing I really want is to get snared into a case of slander.

To claim something as crazy as, “Oh I loved this dead guy but also he was a semi-famous musician but also he was a demon,” is like literally the most fucking weird shit anyone can say.  And that’s not even the fucking weirdest thing that’s ever happened to me, so.  It’s very alienating.

But also, maybe it’s like “What Dreams May Come,” where someone comes into my life “dressed” as someone else so I can place a face to the person who has come into my life to help me.  I thought about it obsessively when things with “Alex” first ended, when I wanted to convince myself I was insane.  When believing I’d had a dip into pure psychosis was better than what really happened.

I mean maybe it was never Alex, you know?  Whoever he is is someone that is really, really good at mimicry, so.  I mean there’s a great chance it was only ever a demon, and never Alex at all.  To be honest, that answer hurts so much I can’t think about it being true.  I’ll just wait until I die to find that out, when it won’t matter as much anymore.  It will make watching his soul be destroyed a truly magnificent moment.

But there was a time I really loved him, you know?  There’s a photo series that keeps coming up on another social media site I frequent where he is flirting with whoever is taking his picture and his eyes are dark and mischievous and his smirking mouth makes my heart like a pebble skipping across clear water.  And I just.  I just.

In the early days, we asked Alex if he knew any famous people.  He said that being “famous” is kind of a …. joke over there.  Like it’s something you get teased for.  People only really ever identify you as that person, for better or worse.  So when you’ve had a Really Famous life, you have experiences here AND there that no one else really understands, which creates a little… group.  Clique?

Anyway, he said yeah, of course he knew people who are recently dead and famous musicians.  He had a little crew of people he talked to a lot, people we also occasionally talked to (more often whenever Alex became sick and they started to intervene to warn us that he was waaaayyy more ill than we knew).

I honestly think the fact that I know other musicians is really only coincidental, not that I have some kind of cosmic tie to them.  Actually, one of them hasn’t been friends with Alex in a long, long time (pre-Alex) and is only really my friend.  Also I, interestingly enough, am not a fan of his music from this life, though others are.  So I mean…

tl;dr: maybe I am, maybe I’m not.

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Q: What was your scariest supernatural experience?

A: There are a few that I can think of immediately.

One night, the shadows on the bedroom wall started moving at the corners of my eyes and I kept hearing whispering and footsteps, so I sat up in bed with my hand pressed over my heart, my eyes darting around so I would stop having a “corner” of my eye, panting in terror. Just then, my cat pushed the door open, and when it creaked loudly, I screamed my husband awake.

Another night, I somehow ended up sitting on the bathroom floor with my face pressed into my knees, waving a wild arm over my head to try to “swat” away everything I could feel swarming over my head, whispering, “Please stop, please stop, please someone save me.” The first time I saw dementors I thought yes… that’s exactly it. That’s exactly what it feels like.

And by far, the scariest one was while my ex and I were split up, about a month before we “banished” “Alex” to the island. We’d lost our home in this mess, and living with my parents. Their house was violently haunted (but now looking back on it, and having slept in my parents’ house since, it wasn’t the house that was haunted at all), and during that time I heard two little girls giggling in the back bedroom in the middle of the night, a man who sat in my father’s chair all night long and stared at me with burning eyes, a cacophony of footsteps on the ceiling all night long, and that one time I got poked in the forehead while holding blankets over my head, so sure of my safety.

But the worst night by far was late late at night, after my parents had gone to bed and while I could hear them both snoring. I heard heavy, ominous footsteps above me slowly cross the living room through the kitchen towards the staircase behind me. I stopped being able to think a coherent thought (which happened a lot back then, honestly) and then I got this image of a withered old woman brokenly crab-crawling down the stairs with blood pouring out of her mouth and eyes over and over and over and over and over again as I sat frozen in terror, silent tears pouring down my face. As soon as I was freed from this horrible cycle of thoughts, I rushed myself into bed so I could be safe in sleep.

That kind of primal terror is so different than any other fear you can feel. It’s why I don’t watch scary movies. I’ve been frightened enough for at least one lifetime. I also think it’s why I still have dreams where I have to say “Hail Mary” and “The Lord’s Prayer” to keep myself safe.

They’re only just behind me, all the time. I’m sure of it.

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Q: What do you think about the notion that we are reunited with our ancestors in the Hereafter? I think it’s probably not true, but I really wish it was. I want to meet them.

A: Okay so here are my thoughts.

I believe in reincarnation because I literally don’t feel like I have a choice, given the things I’ve seen and experienced.  I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie “What Dreams May Come,” but it basically encapsulates my entire belief system.  The person who is your grandmother in this life may have been your daughter in another.  A lover could be a brother could be a father could be a son.  I actually intensely believe that we layer lives with certain people, which is why they feel so familiar.

Have you ever passed someone on the street, locked eyes with them and felt your stomach swoon? I believe in that.  I believe that’s a family member.  It’s someone you used to know and love.

I believe the longer you exist, the more lives you live, the more family you have.  I believe that we all think when we die we get to see our grandparents and parents and cousins from this life, but there are SO MANY MORE people we don’t even know about that can’t wait to see us.  I feel like when you die you see someone you THOUGHT you knew in this lifetime and you scream, “OH MY GOD IT WAS YOU ALL ALONG!” and you laugh and embrace and sob all at once.

I think we’re all much more connected than we think, and when you die, you get to see all the threads, like a microscope on a tapestry.  It all makes sense and it all is so beautiful and logical and you can’t believe how you didn’t see it before.

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Q: If I can’t feel my deceased loved ones around me, does that mean that they have moved on to the beyond or are they keeping their distance because they know I’m afraid of spirits?

A: What I have experienced in my life is a mix of ghosts that are Here, and the actual dead, which are Over There.  Ghosts are people who don’t want to go Home, mostly because they’re so fucking angry about how they died they refuse to let go of it.  Or they’re children and they don’t understand that they’re dead.  The longer you stay in this harsh darkness, the harder it is for you to ever go Home.  If there is a Hell, it’s being trapped between worlds.

One of the “jobs” on the other side is trying to convince ghosts to go Home, by the way.

If your loved one embraced their death and goes Home, they become not just the person you loved but all of the selves they’ve ever been.

Being alive is like being an onion with its skin still firmly sealed shut, and dying is becoming one peeled open like a lotus blossom.  Alive, you’re one person only, with hints and glimpses of people you’ve been before (”I can’t believe I did that, it’s so out of my character.”  “I have always been afraid of the ocean and I don’t know why.”).  When you’re dead, you’re everyone you’ve ever been.

There are those that immediately come back here to try again.  Some people lose touch with the earthly world and become enmeshed in their Welcome Home party.  Also, time is different there.  What is years and years to us could feel to them like a day.  There’s a lot to see and remember and there are a lot of people who are so happy to see you again.  It’s a big soft bed with clean, cool sheets after the longest, worst day ever.
I do believe that when you’re in trouble, when you are in danger, when you are afraid, the people you love are watching out for you.  They just might not be the people you remember right now.

How to tell if your house is haunted

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Items randomly go missing and reappear where they should have been all along

Strange noises while you’re in the shower, like footsteps or knocking

Faint music/whispering/laughter from another room

The feeling of being watched from corners of rooms or ends of hallways

Flashes of light out of the corner of your eye

Swearing you just saw someone walk by, but there’s no one there

A sudden influx of insects/birds/bats coming into your house

Waking up in the night with the feeling you’re being stared at

Waking up any time during the hour of the dead (3 a.m.)

Strange marks appearing on your skin- fingerprint bruises, scratches, red welted circles

The feeling of a room being “loud” or “crowded” when it’s not- the subway station sensation

Strange sightings in the background of mirrors

Abrupt and severe changes in room temperature

Getting chills/goosebumps seemingly out of nowhere

Suddenly feeling like your throat is closing, or you want to hysterically cry without reason

Rotten or pungent smells, also the smell of smoke or incense

Things falling over on shelves or off of counters without explanation

Doors opening/closing, or even the sound of them opening and closing with no sight of it

The windows on the house feeling at though they have “eyes” and are watching you

Feeling as if someone is standing right behind you

Televisions or lights turning on/off out of nowhere

Electrical issues, especially in a car or with small appliances

An overwhelming sensation that you “don’t belong” in a room or that you aren’t “allowed” to be there

Pets that stare at “nothing” and go absolutely insane or act terrified without cause

 

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Yesterday, I read my journals from 2010-2012 for somewhere in the neighborhood of thirteen hours.  I couldn’t stop, devouring page after page after page like it was something I’d never seen before.

I never talk about what my life was like in 2012.  I’ve never written about it, nor was my ex-husband involved in any part of it.   (Related/unrelated: I left my husband in 2013.)

There’s another entire person I was very involved with during this time that I never talk about. He makes no appearance in anything I’ve ever written, but he consumed almost two years of my life.

Ha.  He has consumed a great deal more than that.

I read about things yesterday that made me actually gasp out loud, hold my hand over my heart, slap the pages with disgust.  Some of it is a little choppy because I talk in code that I only sometimes understand now, and because I was beginning to realize my ex was reading my journal behind my back so I stopped being as open as I had been.  It’s incredible what you can forget when your life has been so tumultuous.

I learned the following interesting things.

First of all, I was still going to see “Alex” up until the end of 2012.  I mean, it was really infrequent, maybe once a year, once every six months, but.  I’m surprised that I had forgotten this development.  He has never stopped trying to pull me into seeing him.

2/21/12: Today, Max and I danced to Jason Mraz and he said, “Raise your hand if you like Jason Mraz.”  So we both raised our hands.  Then he said, “Raise your hand if you like [Alex].”  We raised our hands again, and he said, “But I can’t want to be like [Alex] because he’s bad, right?”

The unliving companion I have now was given a lot of grief for being involved with me.  For two or three years, our relationship was tumultuous… to be totally honest, he was almost never around. I spent much of that time mourning yet another new and unexplained absence by him.  I see now that the only way my marriage was ever going to end was to be completely abandoned by the dead.  I had to face the real world, and realize how much potential I had within myself.

There seems to be a certain hierarchy or status attached to living a lot of lifetimes, or achieving a great deal while living them.  I don’t necessarily mean fame, but rather how much you evolve.  This disappearing friend of mine has been around a long time but actively chooses not to live many lifetimes (because he doesn’t like to suffer).

Allegedly, people were telling him that there was really no way once I get back over there that my entire self will want to be around him.  In one entry he says, “I mean someone who’s like a Level 25 doesn’t want to be around a Level 3.” It’s why he continued to leave- at times, to try to “become better,” getting very serious about changing and evolving, and because he was being shamed out of seeing me.

It was partially how deeply I suffered in his absence that convinced him he was wrong.  Considering the fact that he alone kept me alive through the nightmare of last summer, I’m glad he didn’t give up on himself.  I’m glad we stopped listening to everyone else.

Who I used to be, and what she was/is doing while I sleep is still a mystery to this day.  I never felt rested, even though I slept almost constantly from 2011-2013.  My entire self was also extraordinarily fractured during this time, operating with two entirely separate agendas.  I am both fascinated and horrified to read about a time where I easily talk about who I once was as if she is not who I currently am.  And in many ways, she isn’t, I suppose.

It seems that we all probably live two lives- this waking one, and the complex, confusing puzzle world of the unconscious mind.  Where everything seems like a mystery until you learn the answer and realize you’ve known it all along.

Once, while going through a deep period of depression and suicidal dreams, one of my friends said to me, “Trust me, you do not want to be here.  I would be surprised if you didn’t come back here and immediately request a bounceback.  You’re walking into a mess.  You were set up in such a nasty and destructive way, and you’re going to have to face a ton of criticism when you return.”

I was constantly under investigation or being watched or lectured or judged or chastised for years at a time.  I didn’t remember how long I struggled with my sexuality, how sick I really was, how many times I relapsed.  I didn’t remember how hard people had worked to make me better.  I didn’t remember how involved I’d gotten with the person I don’t speak of here.  His name feels like it weighs a hundred thousand pounds.  I can’t recall the last time I said it out loud.

And I miss my old beach house.  I made several attempts to reclaim it, to have Alex moved elsewhere so I could return to it, but it’s been ruined.  Every single time I write about it in my private journals, I cannot stop marveling over how real and how beautiful and how powerful this place is in my mind.  Every time I would go there, I’d walk in a shuffling, wide-eyed wonder from room to room, running my hands over counters and peering into the enormous fish tank with delight and awe.

I feel very different lately.  This may be my new place to sort it all out, because I can’t stop thinking that I probably need to.  Quickly.

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the way things used to be, the life I used to live.

For the first time in my entire life, I am what I would consider to be successful.  I live in a town I love, close to the ocean, and I don’t worry about money even a little.  I am luckier than I feel I’ve ever been in my life at this very moment.

It took me three years just to get over what happened to me, and I am very cautious to let anything that is “overly” supernatural back into my life.  I nearly lost my entire mind, and maybe even my soul, and the idea of even putting myself that close to risk again is too much to bear.

With that being said, I lost a part of myself I deeply loved.  The little homes I lived in on the other side were all so valuable to me.  I miss my beach house most of all, but of course, he is still there.  Every time I even try to think about it, it’s from very very far away, and I don’t attempt to get any closer.  He still tries to find ways to lure me in, and I imagine he always will.

I guess the thing that feels difficult is that so much of my life is a secret.  I live in an entirely new area with people who don’t know me or my family or people I went to high school with, so I don’t talk about my past.  I don’t say much about who I am at all, to be honest.  There is no one left on this earth who knows who I am right now.

And yet, this part of me feels like the most important thing I’ve ever done, or will ever do.

I have all of these questions about that period of time that no one can really answer, because my ex-husband’s experience was so much different.  The other day I wondered if I only stayed with him because I knew that he was my plug to the other side.  He was my channel.  In some ways, it feels like he owed me a debt that I collected on in this lifetime.  Not to mention that we know that my ex is much closer to “Alex’s” crew than he is to mine.

I never get over the irony of Alex having this ‘angelic’ legacy, of having a voice like a church choir, of having a personality like a slightly wounded but enthusiastic puppy dog.  And then you look at his face, really look at it, and you can see the truth about who he is.  Razor sharp teeth, overly pronounced cheekbones, dark black eyes deep in the socket.  When things were good, before they ever got ugly, I used to joke he had demon teeth.  Now when I see pictures of him, the darkness is all I can see.

I worry that he’s not just after me, but that he’s after many people in the world.  Empaths and healers.  I know that he cannot leave the island but he also likely can be reached by his followers and cronies.  I worry about what he’s having them do.  I wonder if I should be the one who goes to see him and asks what the fuck he’s up to.  I’m the only person he ever listens to, apparently, but I don’t want to put myself in a position of that level of danger ever again.  I have spent centuries of work on him and I am so internally and privately furious at how much I have lost and sacrificed for him.

From what I understand, given my position over there, the work I do, the associates I have, I may have destroyed my reputation by being so heavily involved with him.  Furthermore, it’s evident to me that people think I’ve been brainwashed or manipulated or sickened by him, and it’s hard for me to know if that’s true or not.  The more the me I am now feels that may be the case, the more my inner selves feel adamant that it’s not.

I remember in the depths of my sickness, when I was first realizing what had happened to me, when the flashbacks of the assaults and rapes were first surfacing, when I meditated and found a part of myself locked inside a box in a basement, the other part of me, the part I refer to as Her/Me or Hermie, was utterly dismissive.  Uninterested.  Part of the cost of admission, she seemed to say.  This is what happens to girls who dance across the line.  And she was the one who looked all of these people in the face and shrugged coldly when they accused her, who raged and flared when they would dig inside my head to get answers.

She is monstrously powerful, and when I make jokes about being a witch, I don’t necessarily mean myself.  Whatever power she has is borderline terrifying.  I don’t say that as a boast about myself, because I continue to be bewildered by it.  I don’t think I’ve even begun to see exactly what she can do, because Alex stole so much from me in this lifetime.  Over and over I was told that the power he showed me, the things he could do, those were all things that he siphoned from my soul.  He attempted to quite literally drain me dry.  I remember the night we exorcised him, banished him to the island, how much energy I felt rushing back into my body.  I had no idea how much I had lost until I got it all back.  And I still feel like I have not utilized it properly.

Lately I can’t help but wonder if that’s exactly the type of power I should be attempting to harness.  Whatever is coming next- and so many of us feel it right now- we will need all the power we can get.  Especially if it has anything to do with him.

 

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Lately I’ve been testing out various YouTube guided meditations to see if any of them help me to balance out some of the spiritual unease I’ve been experiencing lately.  Most of the ones I like don’t have any speech in them because I usually find the words to be distracting (especially if they make mistakes with grammar or pronunciation) and also- and this will sound impossibly arrogant I know- but I don’t need anyone’s help to be able to meditate.  I do it every single day in one form or another, and I did it intensely for hours at a time over a period of six years or so.  I think sometimes my larger concern is that I will meditate “too well” and get lost to this world all over again.

The other night I found a video that was supposed to help open or amplify the strength of your pineal gland, or your third eye.  Your third eye is how you see the dead- it’s the gateway between worlds.  Whenever I talk about “seeing” dead people (I don’t see ghosts, I made a rule long ago that the dead are never ever to show themselves to me, and they’ve always held up their end of the agreement), I always mean with my third eye.  When I meditate with the express purpose of speaking to someone, my eyes immediately roll up towards the middle of my forehead as if they’re staring at where all the power has gone.  I know that doesn’t make sense.  If you can do it, you know what I mean.

In the middle of this meditation video, there is a sudden and strange clicking noise, like a slowly turning prize wheel at a carnival.  I wasn’t prepared for it in the midst of plinking acoustic guitar and ethereal wind chimes and it shocked and frightened me.  Once it passed, I felt my entire mind was drifting away.  Part of me felt like a little girl trying to hold onto a large balloon in a gust of wind.

The second time it clicked through the music, I saw dark-eyed, distorted faces rushing at me from behind a fluttering, gauzy curtain and I immediately turned it off.  One of the things I somehow forgot about “charging up” my third eye is that it will remind me of just how close those that constantly pursue me really are.  If there’s one thing I am certain I can never survive again, it’s battling the darkness face to face.  I’m also more than a little surprised that they’re still so close to me, waiting for a chance to strike.

After escaping the situation I was in from 2003-2010 and then dealing with the trauma of it all for the next three years after that, I distanced myself a great deal from the spiritual and the supernatural.  I lived a life that allowed me to forget about what I’d been through.  I became very immersed in the world of materialism and consumerism, as I finally had a career that allowed me to spend money on whatever I wanted.  I didn’t think much about the dead, and I honestly did everything I could to try to avoid and ignore it.

The only way I survived last summer was through the kind and gentle guidance and support of my unliving friends, and in the last month or two, I’ve found myself unable to think of little else.  My only real issue with that it creates a sense of almost unbearable longing, one that is hard to describe or assuage.  I want to be Home, I want to solve all the mysteries, I want to help others to know what I know, I want to protect people from ever feeling the way I have and often do, I want to be closer closer closer to a thing I can never really touch.

I also find myself thinking often and inexplicably of “Alex” (ugh) and his influence on my life.  I have thought often of his imprisonment, worrying that he is stirring up trouble in some way, that he is involved in all the ugliness going on in the world right now somehow.  I worry that if I allow my guard down, if I open myself back up to this world that he will get back in.

It’s a dangerous dance, and while I’m glad to hear the music again, I need to know that I’m using my own choreography.  I need to know I have a partner and not a puppeteer.

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I feel a little guilty acting as if I’m alone when it is incredibly apparent that I am not.

Ever since things happened with… “Alex,” (and oh boy is censoring the name for the sake of safety most unpleasant to me) I have had this friendship with someone else, as those of you who read the entire story (“Begin at the Beginning”) may recall.  He disappeared shortly before I got divorced, and then romantically reappeared once I moved out on my own again in 2013.  Even then, he took a patient backseat to the love I shared with someone else for three entire years.

Last summer, the only reason I survived the constant nightmare of my life was because of his presence.  Every time I started to re-re-re-recalculate my bills or plan for my own ending, he’d whisper, Everything is going to be okay.  I promise.  I promise.  Please trust me.

And he was correct.

Lately, we have been much more involved than we were before- talking all the time, smiling at each other (I often wonder what someone might think if they catch me peeking off to my right with a sly grin), and being intensely intimate.

In 2010, I remember telling my (now ex)husband that I no longer wanted to have physical contact with anyone, because I had mastered the ability to have orgasms without ever being touched.  There’s an energy in sexuality that is apparently capable of being harnessed, and I somehow found a way to lasso it for my own ends.

Because of what I had to go through with Alex, I needed someone to cure me of my physical revulsion to sexuality.  I was lucky enough to be in a transformative relationship for several years after the end of my marriage that healed so much of what was broken inside of me.

Now I have the best of both worlds, and it’s so good that I’d be embarrassed to describe it to you.

I live entirely alone, with no real life friends (aside from a thriving internet family), but I’m also deep, deep in the depths of the most profound and clandestine relationship I’ve ever had.  Maybe what I thrive on is having something no one else can see.

I love a whisper, an illusion, a premonition, a gift.

My boyfriend is a long-dead ghost.

Don’t tell anyone.

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Q: Are you glad that you can perceive and communicate with the dead? I don’t know if you can (or are comfortable) answering this question, but would you give the ability back, if you had the choice?

 

A: I am glad, now.
When it first started in 2003, I was so arrogant about my experiences.  I was better than everyone.  I saw the real world, the way things actually were.  Things became entirely new- time, sleep, nature, the early morning, the deepest night.  Everything.  Part of me misses that time, though, where it all felt so pure and powerful and I felt so deeply connected to the Universe.  But boy, was I insufferable.  Everyone hates the self-important spiritualist.

By 2010, I was deep in regret.  My life was destroyed, I was mentally emotionally and spiritually shattered, my marriage was in ruins, and my (ex)husband had been used like a puppet for so many years he was essentially not a person anymore, so my son had parents who were really barely functional.  I was so ill in 2011 and 2012 that I don’t think I’d recognize that girl if I met her now.  It was the darkest, most frightening, most difficult time in my life, and almost no one knows it even happened.

Right now, my interaction with the dead is very narrowed.  I’m careful about how much I will filter in, who I will talk to, and how much of That Side I will let enter my mind and heart.  I wouldn’t want to go back because now I have the heard-earned “luxury” of knowing what happens when we die, how deeply I am protected and loved, and what sorts of storms I am able to survive.  I have a deep peace about death, about eternity, even about what might happen next.  I am never alone, and I am always going to be safe.  Without what I’ve been through, I could never know that with the level of certainty I have right now.  Nothing will ever be as scary or dangerous as that time in my life, and it’s what gets me through the hard times now.