PROLOGUE
Spring 2017
a perfect flawless reflection
of a perfectly flawed you
it is all they'll see
I’d give her a solid 6.5 out of 10, more on the pretty side of the scale than not. A decent 7.5 with her brows filled in, her lashes coated with mascara, her blemishes concealed, and her lips tinted with color.
She was softer now that she was in her thirties, her profile curvier than before. Her petite frame could still rock a swimsuit—the shapewear one-piece kind though, if we’re being completely candid, versus the little bikinis she used to prefer in her younger, island-girl days.
She had long thick jet-black hair, once poetically described by a hip coworker as “luscious AF.” Her almond tan skin, which she used to be ridiculed for in grade school, was now something she got complimented on frequently. Where she grew up, skin-lightening products were everywhere. All the ads told her she needed fair skin to be considered attractive. That was not the case in America, and it was a refreshing thing to get used to.
She liked her eyes okay. They were oak brown when illuminated by sunlight; deep and dark, almost inky black, when not.
That’s how they were now: inky black, staring straight back at me as I sat unmoving in front of the vanity mirror in the dim bedroom, the late-afternoon sun receding into nighttime. In the living room, Walter White and Jesse Pinkman were having another intense conversation. Something about someone’s girlfriend overdosing and dying.
My phone vibrated. I looked away from the mirror and picked up my phone.
“My loves, I need a weekend trip to Vegas. You in? If we leave in an hour, we’ll make it there before midnight!”
Buzz. “Yes! Packing up now!”
Buzz. “I think I can squeeze that into my schedule. Kidding. I'm in.”
Buzz. “I'm in too. My husband can watch the kids this weekend. It’s the least he can do.”
I put my phone down and felt a slight stir of interest at the idea of getting away for the weekend with my best girlfriends.
Maybe I should go, I thought. Maybe this is just what I need: a spontaneous getaway with my soul sisters, where I can sort my thoughts out, escape from this world for a bit.
Escape. There’s that word again.
I sighed. My heart felt heavy with the weight of the emptiness that had been bearing down on me for months. As if it knew it had my attention, the heavy emptiness burrowed a notch deeper. The hurricane of thoughts that was ever present in my mind pulsated to the rhythm of my phone buzzing as the beautiful souls in my group chat eagerly enquired about my potential participation in such a spontaneous weekend endeavor.
What do I do?
I looked up at the mirror again. I looked at the empty shell of a woman with the luscious-AF hair and almond skin. What do I do? I have been asking myself this question a lot lately. Nothing like a loved one passing away to throw you into an existential crisis.
It was then, almost instantly, that I felt a moment of clarity, as if I had known all along what I needed to do, and the time had simply come to take action. It was eerie. The brain hurricane subsided and paused, as if it too was curious to see what I would do next.
I stood up. Oh shit.
I grabbed my phone from the dresser. “Hey, loves. I’m sorry but I won’t be able to make it. Have so much fun,” I texted my girlfriends.
I took a deep breath. Oh shit. I walked out of the bedroom and into the living room. Jesse Pinkman was absolutely distraught about something, but so was I internally.
The husband of seven years looked away from the TV and smiled at me. “Heya!” he said.
Oh shit. I forced a smile and sat next to him on the couch. “Hey! Can we talk?”
An hour and a half later, I packed a few items into a carry-on bag, booked myself a hotel room in Salt Lake City, and got into my car.
I looked at the rearview mirror one more time at the life I'd known for seven years, then I turned the ignition and drove away. And that was the beginning of the end of us.
My heart was unbearably heavy, but this time, it felt just a tiny bit less empty.
PART I
Chapter 1
Summer 2009
this is our existence.
ever visible and constant,
ever constantly present.
we are sea and sky colliding
on a horizon that both
connects and separates us.
do you greet the sun as it leaves me?
do your waves rise up to reach me?
because I know my breeze flows to feel you.
this is our existence.
in each other we are present.
for we are inevitably each other's constant.
It was the comfortable kind of silence. I gazed through the open window of the passenger side of his white 1970 Volkswagen Beetle as he drove me home, my head buzzing with intoxication and residual sweaty club energy.
It was two in the morning on a Friday night, and I was caught up in a beautiful paradox of timelessness that acknowledged neither morning nor night. I was young, invincible, completely independent from sleep, and impressively immune to hangovers. I had the superpower of being twenty-three.
“It’s two a.m., and the night is young, world!” I happily hollered at the empty streets of the city.
He smiled. I laughed.
We kept driving at a leisurely pace, the barely lit city streets coasting past my open window like a quiet steady train that had a definite destination, a definite purpose.
I reached out and grabbed his right hand. Suddenly, I knew that I didn’t want to go home yet. I swiveled my head to look at him, the steady train captain with a definite destination, a definite purpose to take me home from the party.
“I don’t want to go home yet,” I declared with conviction.
He looked sideways, left hand on the steering wheel, right hand holding mine, and he smiled again. “Okay, where do you want to go?”
Where did I want to go? I digested the question for a second. I was destinationless. I was infinite. I was free.
“Let’s go to the beach and wait for the sunrise,” I told him.
His smile grew wider. We kept driving, holding hands, until the street lights and city silhouettes disappeared. We were heading to the coast. This was the best thing about island life. Cebu City was like a tropical New York City, except the Pacific Ocean was always just an hour’s drive away.
I was still tipsy when we slowed to a stop. He turned the ignition off, and the headlights blinked into complete darkness. It was pitch black and absolutely still except for the sound of ocean waves crashing against the shore.
I’m home.
I jumped out of the car and breathed in the familiar ocean air. This. Years from now, when I’m asking myself what happiness looked and felt like, I would think of this.
We fumbled our way through the dark until we felt sand on our bare feet and there was nothing left between us and the ocean’s ancient rhythmic song. We were now at the front row of the invisible nature show. It was 3:00 AM, the night was young, and so were we.
When the sun rose that morning, we were there to greet it, drunk on spontaneity and the promise of our youth.
Chapter 2:
Winter 2015
I used to be young and wild.
Now I’m old and wild.
Wise. I’m old and wise.
The indisputable need to empty the digested contents of my stomach woke me up. The mother of migraines was on a personal mission to torment me as soon as consciousness descended, leaving no question that it were my poor life choices and ingestion of excessive libations the night before that I was being punished for on this fine Saturday morning.
I checked the motionless form to my left. He was still asleep. I slowly, agonizingly, got out of bed, willing my gut to hold it in until I made it to the bathroom. Then I held my own hair and puked with a passion. I felt my way to the sink and splashed my face with the frigid liquid that no twenty-nine-year-old hungover woman with a migraine should ever have to subject herself to at 8:37 AM on a weekend.
Coffee? I timidly proposed to my half-awake brain. Immediately I felt my belly laugh diabolically, hinting at more regurgitation episodes should I decide to accept such a proposal.
I crawled back to bed, vaguely registering that the sleeping man in my bed had woken up and was getting ready to get on with his day.
Have fun and be careful, I intended to say. “Unhhh hnnnuh hnnn,” I eloquently instructed him instead before succumbing back into the unconscious. So this was what being borderline-thirty and married felt like.
A few hours later I woke up again to see Pepto Bismol, a glass of water, and two pieces of dry toast on the bedside table next to me. My face cracked into a smile. What a swell guy.
Find yourself a man who leaves you with a hangover care kit when you’ve accidentally had too much Rumple Minze with coworkers the night before. A man who drives you to the beach at two in the morning because you wanted to see the sunrise.
I looked out the window and saw that it was snowing. The world had turned into wintry fluff overnight. It truly never got old. Utah was a beautiful four-faced phoenix, reincarnating into a new look with every season.
The husband-of-five-years had gone to Park City for some backcountry skiing with his friends and wouldn’t be back until after dinner.
I—clumsy, uncoordinated wife who had collided with someone the last time I attempted skiing—would bury myself under the covers, read a good book, and watch the snow drift down from the gray atmosphere into the ether of my own gray daydreams, nursing a hangover. Just another typical weekend for a young professional hippie in America.
It had been five years since we got married and immigrated from the Philippines to Utah together. We were best friends. He was as quiet and calm as I was constantly buzzing and restless. He was the anchor, the safe harbor, the steady train captain with a definite destination.
I nibbled at the dry toast, looking through the frosty French windows facing the backyard of our apartment, my head humming with almost unbearable nostalgia and residual intoxication.
Where was I going? I was destinationless. I was finite. I was empty.
Chapter 3:
Fall 2016
Don't call it a private battle
(because it never was a fight).
The truth of the matter is
you have always chosen flight.
For years you've closed doors behind you
(you were never one for backward views).
And then you bury your thoughts so deeply
until they have no chance (ever) of becoming memories.
And of course you get by just fine,
(not despite) living your convincing life-charade of denial.
But here's the unbreakable fact you will ultimately have to face:
This was never about your recurring fear of being insidiously chased;
this is about your enduring impulse to always (always) run away.
I was walking through a dark maze of suffocating foliage. Everything felt heavy, eerily still, like you knew something bad was about to happen. Misty in a The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug kind of way. There was barely any light for me to see where I was going.
Where was I going? I think I was trying to find my way out?
I tried to feel my way along the walls, but I realized I couldn’t. Turned out, both my hands were ocupado. Like, super ocupado. I was carrying two mammoth-sized wedding rings, one on each arm. Each one was about four feet high and made of pure gold. They were heavy and balanced on either side of me as I tried to make my way through the suffocatingly tight maze.
I’m dreaming, I realized.
It was an agonizingly slow, slow-motion dream. I slothed through the maze, carrying the massive rings and doing my best not to drop them.
Hmmm. Lots to unpack here, I thought to my dream self. Tight maze. Murky darkness. Massive wedding rings. I think this means either my marriage is really important to me or it is weighing heavily on me. What are you telling me, brain? Oh and look, I have resorted to psychoanalyzing my own dream within my dream, while I am dreaming. That’s either very impressive or very concerning.
I stirred awake. My eyes registered three glowing red numbers. It was the clock next to me on my side of the bed. 1:11 AM. My eyes drifted shut again.
—
It was dark. I was slow-motion running as fast as I could. There were two shadowy figures behind me. I recognized this neighborhood. I had lived here until I was eleven.
I looked behind me. They were gaining on me.
Why can’t I run any faster? Faster, legs. Faster!
I ran until I reached the house I had lived in when I was eight. Everything looked exactly the same. I could see the blue station wagon parked in front of the house, the white lace curtains covering the living room windows, my brother’s BMX bike laying on its side by the front door, the intricate white patterns of the cast-iron lawn chairs right next to the lemon tree in the front yard.
I had lost complete control of my breathing. I’d seen it happen a million times. When the runaway breath train took off, there was no stopping it.
Don’t. Don’t hyperventilate, I frantically screamed at my dream self.
I looked behind me. The two shadow figures were still coming after me. I was so tired. I was so sick of being chased. I was just. So. Tired.
My legs buckled as I sobbed violently, and I gave up on any attempts to move. I lay there on the manicured lawn of my childhood home, curled up into a ball, hyperventilating and scream-crying.
I’m dreaming. I’m just dreaming. I’ve had this recurring dream for almost two decades now. This is a dream. This is just a dream, I chanted to myself frantically.
I felt a sliver of an inhale that felt more voluntary than not, and I grasped at it, clinging to it with all my might until I could muster one more controlled dream breath. And then another. And then another. The violent scream-crying subsided.
You’re dreaming. This is a dream. You’ve been having this recurring dream for almost two decades. You’re dreaming. This is a dream.
My eyes flew open, and my body jerked awake. I looked at the clock. 2:22 AM.
My eyes were wet, my pillow was drenched, and I felt like I had been running all night. I was exhausted. I was still breathing heavily. My throat hurt from what felt like hours of paralyzed, silent screaming. My heart was sore from repeatedly slamming itself against my rib cage.
I willed myself to stay awake. Sleep was unsafe, and I wanted no part of it.
—
I was back on the lawn of my childhood home. I was in a fetal curl, too drained to do anything but breathe shallow breaths. The two shadowy men were coming. There was nothing I could do.
Why did this keep happening? Why did I keep being chased in my dreams? I was terrified. Exhausted. Angry at the dream shadows. Angry at myself. And then angry at myself again for being angry at myself.
The usual Night Terror Fear-Anger Inception Cocktail tonight then, miss? my invisible dream bartender asked in an English accent.
Shut up, Alfred. I’m too tired and scared to appreciate your poorly timed humor. I lay there, nervously bantering with myself, bracing myself for the inevitable.
And then, another dream voice appeared. It sounded familiar. It was mine. The lucid voice was calm, anchored, admirably unafraid: What if this isn’t about you being chased? What if this is about you running away?
Everything stilled for a perfect fraction of a second. Fetal-ball dream-me uncurled imperceptibly as I tentatively dipped a toe into that strange thought pool: What if this is about me running away?
And then without transition, I was fully submerged into the experimental thought water.
I’ve been running away. I’ve been desperately running away this whole time, my dream-self marveled at the explosive subconscious revelation.
Stop running. Let them come, my higher self urged.
So I lay there and waited. And the shadows never came.
I drifted out of REM sleep for the third time that night and stirred awake. I looked at the clock: 3:33 AM. I looked at the sleeping form next to me. He was asleep, undisturbed. The steady train captain. Anchored and calm. The husband of almost seven years.
I lay awake, my pillow drenched in sweat and tears, until the rest of the Mountain Standard Time Zone caught up with me.
When the sun rose that day, it felt like my entire world had changed.
Chapter 4:
Winter 2017
And as I lie here in the shadows
I think about how
Things have changed lately
Like how I’m already in bed
And it’s only eight thirty
Beyond this point you may encounter clothing optional sunbathers, the sign read. It was our seventh-anniversary trip, and we were exploring sea caves in Southern California.
"I mean, I'm really just here for the sea caves. I suppose one must push forward in pure pursuit of sea-cave views despite other, uh, potential view obstacles," I said.
He laughed. I smiled.
It was exactly two weeks after that fateful night when I had three lucid dreams in a row, waking up to see repeating numbers on the digital clock. Since then, I started seeing repeating numbers everywhere.
The week before our trip, I purchased my usual 16 oz almond milk latte at my usual coffee shop but tipped extra, and the bill came out different: $6.66. I drove home from work that Friday, and I just happened to glance at the dashboard when the clock said 5:55 PM. Multiple times in those two weeks since the dreams, I would glance at my phone and the clock would read 11:11.
I prided myself in my efforts to maintain scientific integrity in how I approached most life situations, and I decided that these repeating numbers were occurring frequently enough for me to pay attention and investigate further. It was time to do extensive online research about the aforementioned observed phenomenon of repeating digits.
Methodology: enter the search term "repeating numbers" on Google. Read two or three articles about it.
Conclusion: Findings showed that these were angel numbers, and the angels were trying to tell me something.
Since this resonated enough with the low-key sense of foreboding that had been humming in the back of my mind since Serial Lucid Dream Night, I accepted the findings and concluded my research. Another point for science.
"Whoa!" he exclaimed, snapping me out of my scientifically backed reverie. We had reached the sea caves, sans unsightly (or sightly) encounters, and it was breathtaking.
I breathed in the view. The ocean had my soul, and it cheered me up without fail.
"Thanks for taking me to the ocean. You know me so well!" I told him.
Right then, my phone vibrated. I took it out of my pocket to see who was calling. It was my mom.
Uh-oh, I thought. My mom lived in Winnipeg, Canada, with my dad. She rarely called out of the blue during the day. The foreboding hum moved itself to front and center as I picked up.
"Hey, darling, is now a good time?" my mom asked.
It was a good question. When was a good time to tell someone that their grandmother had passed away due to an inoperable tumor that had embedded itself into the most inaccessible parts of her brain? Saturday at 11:11 AM was as good of a time as any, I guess.
I felt detached, justified that Foreboding Hum had turned out to mean something and I wasn't just going crazy. Yet at the same time, I somehow felt relieved that I didn't have to keep waiting for something bad to happen anymore (at least until the next foreboding hum came) because the bad thing was already here.
My grandma had passed away peacefully in her two-story home in the suburbs of Freigericht, Germany the night before. My parents were on their way to Germany for her funeral.
This was the first real loss I had experienced. My grandma was relatively young, only in her late seventies. She'd lived in Germany for most of my life, so it wasn't like we were in each other's lives that much to begin with.
It was an odd sensation: feeling like you'd just been robbed of something you didn't realize was important until you'd lost it, and then feeling instant regret for not valuing it when you had it.
He must have sensed that it was not a good phone call. "What's wrong," he asked when I hung up.
I couldn't remember how I relayed to him the fact that my grandma was gone. I would take an educated guess and say it would have gone along the lines of me saying, "We spend so much of our lives forgetting about all the good things we have. What did we expect, that grandmothers would live forever?"
It was a quiet drive back to the Airbnb. It was the sad kind of silence. He let me lose myself in Bob Dylan and my own thoughts as he drove us back. I never wanted to impose my sorrow on anyone, so I locked myself in the bedroom and cried alone for two and a half hours.
That night, I opened my pocket journal and purged poetry-style:
often it takes
a death
for a life
to be remembered.
don't wait.
The next day and for the rest of the trip, I was a high-functioning grieving granddaughter slash pleasantly appreciative anniversary-celebrating wife who wrote her feelings away at night and snapped Instagram-worthy photos during the day.
To the outside world, I was coping. To my internal demons, something in my subconscious had shifted monumentally, and it was only a matter of time before the mother of triggers came for her long-overdue day of reckoning.
Chapter 5:
Spring 2017
and you laugh when you can
and wait for the snow dust to settle
it’s all coming down now, see?
true, yesterday was upside-down
today’s just fuzzy and buzz
leave tomorrow be.
if the sun sets for the moon to rise
and the moon moves to change the tides
what do you set for? what do you move for?
when the snow globe shatters
and your fake world breaks,
will you find yourself free forever?
“Have a good night, Edgar!” I called out to the office facilities manager as I left the office building after work.
Edgar smiled and waved back. “You too! Be careful driving in this rain.”
It was a rainy evening, just a few minutes past six on a Thursday night. I got into my car, shrugged off my wet trench coat, and threw it onto the passenger seat along with my purse. As I turned the ignition on, I felt the familiar heart-drop at the thought of heading home. That had been happening a lot lately.
I shook my head and drove out of the parking garage and into the rain. I took a right on 9th East like I did every day. I put on Blind Pilot’s “Umpqua Rushing,” the most beautiful song ever written in my lifetime.
I heard Israel Nebeker’s inhale followed by the poignant strain of Dave Jorgensen’s singular note on the keyboard. “Panic in the first beat of the morning. Even what I’ve got isn’t worth offering.”
It was the kind of song you played endlessly on repeat because you wished it would never end. I knew every word by heart.
Tears sprang to my eyes for the nth time that week. Ever since my grandma passed away two months prior, I had learned to wear waterproof mascara and keep a box of tissues in the car. It was dangerous to drive when you didn't.
I was approaching the intersection where I would turn right to get to our apartment. Against my will, I kept the steering wheel pointed straight ahead and kept moving forward until I had passed my turn.
Okay. This is what we are doing, I guess. We shall drive aimlessly and follow whichever road we feel like following until we reach a dead end.
The rain kept pouring. There was something comforting about driving in the rain as the daylight disappeared and the city lights gradually blinked awake. I kept driving, turning when I felt like turning, going straight if the road permitted.
“Are you over me? Are you? Are you are,” Israel grieved as if he were grieving with me.
A little over an hour later, I had finally reached a dead end, and it was time to turn back. My heart dropped again as I followed the road that would take me back to my apartment. I reached another intersection where I was supposed to turn right. I turned left instead.
As I drove along 45th South, I saw a sign to my right: Sacred Energy Crystal Shop.
I decided to make a stop. It was going to be my coworker’s birthday the next day, and she loved crystals. I felt it was only right to drop in to see if I could get her a little something.
And then you go home, I told myself sternly, ignoring the heart-drop, fully aware I was stalling yet again.
It was 7:53 PM. I seemed to remember the store closing at 7:00 PM, yet there were still two or three cars arriving in the parking lot, and there was a small group of people who were heading into the store. I followed.
The small group went to a little room to the right of the entrance, and then they disappeared down the stairs to the basement. I hesitated. The store owner must have noticed me looking lost.
She came over with a welcoming smile. I wish I could say I was a tad more articulate in times of confusion and uncertainty.
“Wha-what is this?” I released words from my mouth clumsily.
She laughed. “Oh, we are having a full moon sound bath tonight, and it starts in three minutes. Would you like to join us?”
I had no idea what a full moon sound bath was, but I heard myself say, “Sure.”
“Wonderful. It will be $9.99. It’s an hour-long session. If you head down these steps, you’ll see a small room just to the left. There are blankets and pillows by the door. Help yourself, and make yourself comfortable.”
I followed her instructions and clogged down the wooden steps. I was very overdressed in my Vince Camuto booties and Ann Taylor work clothes. As I entered the room, I realized most everyone else was wearing yoga clothes or pajamas, and they had all brought yoga mats to lay on. I grabbed a blanket and picked a chair in the darkest corner in the very back of the room. I sat and waited quietly.
The room was lit by two salt lamps on each corner in front of the room. A man in a white shirt and colorful dhoti pants was sitting cross-legged between the salt lamps, surrounded by a semi-circle of seven white crystal bowls of varying sizes in front of him.
He had long salt-and-pepper hair that was currently twisted into a topknot. He had a stack of meditation beads on each wrist, and three layers of crystal necklaces around his neck. He looked like Hippie George Clooney.
Before him, people were lying on their yoga mats with their eyes closed, calmly waiting for the full moon sound bath to commence. I had no idea what would happen next.
“Good evening, everyone,” Man-Bunned George finally said in a hushed voice. “It’s a magical evening. Did you feel the juniper tree’s energy tonight as you passed it in the parking lot?”
There were murmurs of agreement. I stayed silent. There was a juniper tree in the parking lot?
George thankfully couldn’t read my thoughts (as far as I could tell). “Now close your eyes, and let the music take you on the journey you’re meant to be on tonight.”
I managed not to laugh. I kept my eyes half-closed and waited.
Softly and gently, Hippie Clooney tapped the rim of the largest bowl with what looked like a pestle and guided it around the rim at an angle until a beautiful, haunting tone emanated from the bowl and floated across the room. With his left arm, he produced another tone by softly guiding another pestle around the rim of a smaller quartz bowl. The higher frequency of the smaller bowl resonated beautifully with the other deeper tone.
Despite myself, I sighed, closed my eyes fully, and let the crystal music wash over me. Eventually, I lost all sense of time and space.
“Let the vibrations positively charge your brainwave frequency. Remember, you are made of crystalline structures. Let the music infuse your cells with positive energy. Let it heal you,” Guru George half-whispered hypnotically from afar.
I was floating in pitch blackness. I didn’t have anywhere to be, didn’t have anything to do. I was just . . . here. After a while, I felt the heavy emptiness in my heart lifting slowly until it no longer weighed on me for the first time in months. It almost felt like I was dreaming.
The music washed over me until it entered the shimmering black space I was floating in. Before long, I was enveloped in the sheer beauty of the intimate, ethereal harmony. I had never experienced music so immanent, so transcendent.
The weight kept lifting. I felt like I was completely underwater and I was slowly rising to the surface, except there was no light to indicate where "up" was. I felt goosebumps on my arms, and I pulled the borrowed blanket tighter around me. I was aware of the room I was in, but it felt very far away, like I had one foot planted in the real world and the other foot on the other side of the portal to the dream world.
I kept floating and rising until I felt a separation, as if my consciousness had left my physical body and I was now seeing myself from a third-person perspective. But at the same time, I was tethered to the physical me, and I was very much aware of myself being outside of myself. Somehow this all seemed vaguely familiar, like this was something I had simply forgotten I was capable of doing and now was reminded of.
I kept floating in the darkness. Outside-me floated in front of real-world-me, slightly above my head, looking at me with so much love and compassion. Like she knew me completely and accepted me wholly. Like she had been waiting this whole time for me to find her. It felt overwhelmingly pure and nostalgic.
Without warning, my eyes flooded. I kept my eyes shut and curled deeper into the shadows. But I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing. Beside me, someone shifted, and I felt a box of tissues gently placed on my lap. I didn’t realize someone had sat next to me, but I accepted the gift blindly, gratefully.
I sat there in the company of my other self, crying quietly until the music gradually subsided. I felt myself being guided down gently until I could feel my feet planted on the ground, my hands clutching at wet tissues, the blanket draped over my shoulder. For a few minutes, there was only silence.
Slowly I opened my eyes and oriented myself against the dark room. I let out a long, deep breath. Well, that was unexpected.
“Welcome back,” Alternate Universe George Clooney whispered reassuringly after a few minutes. “If you are driving tonight, give yourself a little bit of time before you drive. Find the moonlight. Greet that juniper. Thank you for sharing this experience with me. Until our next journey.”
I left the room before the other meditators could fold their yoga mats. I felt raw, and I needed to be in the privacy of my own car. I climbed up the steps into the brightly lit room. The store owner was there to meet me.
She enveloped me in a sincere hug. I’d always had a thing against strangers touching me, but for once I belatedly realized that I hadn’t flinched when she moved in for a hug. She released me and searched my eyes.
“It seemed like you really needed that healing,” she said. I think she was the one who offered me the tissues.
“I . . . I did,” I finally admitted simply. This jagged soul hole. I wasn’t empty. I was just wounded.
I walked out of the crystal shop. The rain had stopped.
I breathed in the night air and looked up. The moon was full and bright. I passed the twisted juniper tree and smiled.
Then I got into my car and drove home. It was 9:07 PM. It was the night before that fateful Friday night when Jesse Pinkman’s girlfriend died of an overdose. It was the night before The Talk.
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