by Salicrow
Then the apartment door opened and his friend walked in, alone. I asked where Lindsey was, and he said she had decided to go back to the party. As he shut the door, the energy in the room changed, becoming much thicker. I felt pressure exploding in my chest, making me conscious of my breathing, and my stomach knotted up the way it did when I knew psychically that something big was going to happen.
Sitting there, I began to evaluate my situation. I was in an apartment by myself with two guys I didn’t know—one of whom had already been pushy in his sexual advances, and the other standing between me and the door. My friend was gone, and I didn’t know where she was or if she was okay, having only the word of a complete stranger to go on.
Before I could think of what to do, I heard a voice in my head, as loud as if someone were standing right in front of me. It spoke clearly and with purpose: Move now, get up and cross the room. Don’t stop, just go.
As I got off the couch with my heart pounding so hard I thought it would burst out of my chest, I noticed that the world around me seemed altered. It was as if everything had fallen into the background of reality, and the only things that were real at that moment were me and the door.
Like so many times in the past, I was two Salis at once, the experiencer and the watcher. I felt like I was moving super-fast, so fast that everything else appeared to be standing still. I removed myself from Brian’s arm around my shoulder and got off the couch easily. In my altered state I wove across the room, avoiding obstacles, and walked quickly out the door, passing the dark-haired man in the doorway.
As I moved across the apartment and out the door, the men remained perfectly still, not even blinking. I had stopped time.
The observer in me watched in awe and wonder as I raced out of the building and across the street, while the experiencer felt like I was engaged in some sacred dance where my only concern was putting one foot in front of the other. I was completely calm and focused on removing myself before anything could happen. All the while the voice in my head kept directing me: Move now, go, Sali, keep moving. Don’t stop, don’t hesitate, don’t look back.
I did not stop moving until I reached the sidewalk across the street. Standing there under the streetlight, I took my first real breath in a while. I wondered if I had been holding it the whole time or whether I just been moving so fast that I had not needed to take a breath. Had this all taken place in the space of a breath?
I knew something supernatural had just happened and that I had just experienced something exceptional. I knew I should still be in that room, perhaps being raped by two men. I knew my story could have ended with me battered and bruised or dead. I didn’t know how to explain what had just occurred, but I had experienced something that made me change my beliefs about reality.
The experience of being outside of time and space was surreal. I felt like Superman, or a vampire, able to move at supersonic speed while the world held still. My mind was filled with questions: What had happened? How had I done it? I felt as though I recognized the voice that had spoken in my mind; I thought I knew him somehow. He wasn’t a dead relative, but something else. He was connected to me; we were connected to each other … but how?
Feeling shaken, with scrambled thoughts, I walked quickly back to the party, hoping and praying that Lindsey would be there when I returned and that she wasn’t lying somewhere by the side of the road.
When I walked through the door of the party, Lindsey took one look at me and cried out, “Where have you been? What happened to you?”
I had no idea how to answer, for I really didn’t know what had just happened to me. How do you tell your friend that you barely escaped being raped by two men because a spirit told you to move, and you stopped time? All I could say was that we needed to leave right away. I wanted to get the fuck away from what had almost happened, and I needed to process the experience.
It took me years to fully understand the events of that night, and many more years to get over the trauma of what could have happened. But I do know that I was lucky, that I escaped calamity through supernatural forces that I couldn’t explain.
For years, the smell of sawdust would trigger me, and I would remember how I had been spared. I now know that the voice encouraging me to bend time was Peter, the spirit I refer to as Big Business; Peter, my guide of many names and faces, Peter who was Sarah, who would later introduce himself as Rosemary.
I am also aware that Peter did not bend time for me. He simply prompted me to connect with my higher self, that part of consciousness that remembers all of the knowledge I have accumulated while passing from lifetime to lifetime. I simply remembered how to do it.
I have thought about this moment often. I have never once doubted my experience or questioned what I thought would have happened if I had stayed. Nor have I questioned my mental state or my interpretation of the event. I have always known that I stepped through time, sped up reality, and saved myself.
I’ve met a few others who have experienced being outside of known time and space. These are people who, like me, stopped time when they were in a desperate situation, allowing them to alter the outcome. I consider this one of my defining moments in life. It showed me that the world was not as solid as I imagined it to be, and it told me that the games I had played in the mirror as a girl were not games at all.
22
Little Gold Bag
By the end of my senior year in high school I was experiencing a flourish of spiritual intervention. It seemed that every time I turned around, spirit was redirecting me, trying to keep me out of harm’s reach. I began to feel that the divine had plans for me, and I knew my experiences were connected to my psychic ability. I couldn’t go back to believing the world was flat—or, in this case, merely three-dimensional.
I pretty much stopped drinking, although I still partook of marijuana and the occasional hallucinogen. I was searching for the doorway I had crossed that led to altered time and space. I wanted to step into that world as easily as I had done when I was a child and as quickly as I did that night in Lancaster. I didn’t have the words for what I sought, but I was looking for a shamanic experience. I wanted to bust out of the confines that my mind was locked in.
Smoking pot was a way to force myself across a border, trying to induce an experience by altering my mind. My life had been in such grief and turmoil that I didn’t remember that such places were attainable without drugs. Having forgotten the simplicity of my childhood ventures into the other world, I made them ultra-complicated.
Just last year, I had a “wyrd” experience while hunting for treasures at a flea market in Fort Myers, Florida—an experience that provided a powerful reminder of those pot-redolent days. It’s no accident that the Norse term wyrd shares an etymology with “weird,” though that is a latter-day dumbing down of a term meaning “come to pass, come due, preordained, having the power to control fate.” Wyrd refers to those things that must be, the moments that are heavily woven into the fabric of our lives. The weird sisters of yore who also grace Shakespeare’s Macbeth are the three Fates of Greek and Roman heritage. Sometimes spirit and fate converge and intervene. When this happened at the flea market in Florida, it caught me off guard and nearly brought me to tears.
I was browsing the wares with my friend, proud of a blue velvet beret I had already claimed and not expecting to find anything else of worth. Then I came across a small, antique gold bag. I picked it up and admired it, and I began to quietly tell my friend how I had once owned a similar bag. My bag had belonged to Grammy Brown, and when I was a teenager it had been one of my treasures. I brought the gold bag with me everywhere, and later I carried my pot in it. I often referred to it as my magic bag, as it seemed to contain an endless supply of herb. I attributed this affluence to the bag itself and laughed with my friends about its power.
I used marijuana so excessively back then to escape the sadness I felt around the loss of my original family. I knew I was wasting my life, but as long as the bag was filled with pot
, I was going to smoke it.
Then I lost the bag. I was devastated, but I knew on a psychic level that it had been taken from me—not by a person, but by spirit. Technically I lost it when I was at a party that got busted by the police, but there was no doubt in my mind that it was spirit’s way of saying, Enough is enough. We are not going to stand by and watch you piss your life away.
As much as it pained me to lose a bag that had belonged to Grammy Brown, I was thankful to the universe and God/Goddess for their intervention. The older, stronger part of me, the observer/higher self, was actually relieved. The decision had been taken out of my hands by a cosmic parent forbidding my further self-destruction. I was being reminded of a contract I had signed before birth, one that the spirits that look over me were going to hold me to. I had work to do.
I know there are logical reasons why I could no longer get as much pot anymore, but I also felt there was a psychic connection. The timing of the loss of the bag marked the intervention of spirit. Spirit withheld action until the moment when it would have the most impact, so that the bag being taken from my life felt like being bitch-slapped by fate. The loss was powerful, and I considered it among the great lessons of my life.
It was the final kick in the ass of my shifting my life. The move to Vermont had released me of my eating disorder, the experience of stepping out of time had excised my desire to drink, and the loss of my Grammy Brown’s bag walloped me upside the head and said, You will never be addicted to anything. You will not let any substance hold power over you.
After telling my friend my tale in the flea market, I put down the gold bag and walked away, thankful for the opportunity to see how far I had come. A few moments later, while browsing at a table across the way, I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. I turned around and saw the woman who was the proprietor of the table where the gold bag was. She had it in her hand, and she handed it to me and told me she wanted me to have it. She said she felt a need to give it to me. I was shocked and almost began crying on the spot. I asked her if she had overheard my story, and she said she hadn’t. She just felt a sudden need to give me the bag.
I told her the story of the gold bag I had lost. She thanked me, and we hugged.
I felt that the return of the bag from the hand of a stranger was Grammy’s way of telling me how proud she was of me. I knew that the moment had been for more than just me; it had also been for the woman who gave me the bag. Spirit was speaking to her as well, reminding her that the world is much more complex than we think. We were both being reminded. Remember, in this world, there is no proof of spirit, only glimpses and reminders. We are the ones who have to recognize them and let them lead us along spirit’s path.
23
Friend of my Soul
I was in the fourth grade when I first laid eyes on John. He was in eighth grade and didn’t notice me. I was instantly fascinated with him. He wasn’t that handsome and was recovering from cancer. He was sickly looking and almost bald, yet he was one of the shiniest people I had ever seen. I knew him. Somehow I just knew him. I wasn’t fascinated with him in the manner of a crush but in a much stronger way. I felt our connection and believed that the strands of our souls had been woven together before.
I remember the words he left behind in his eighth-grade yearbook: “I get by on love, guts, and the occasional candy bar.” This told me all I needed to know about him. John was brave, loving, and fun.
We became friends when I was fourteen and dated for the first time when I was fifteen and he was twenty-one. The age difference was significant: he was an adult living in his own apartment, and I was a sophomore in high school living with my father. I had real concerns that my dad would kill a bearded man showing up at the door asking for me, even if it had been foretold in the tarot-card reading that Cookie had just done, when she told me I would soon date a guy who was six years older than I was.
Then my world came to a stop and I was sent away without notice to Vermont. Our relationship came to an end, with distance and age playing equal parts. I held no negative feelings. I understood that the relationship couldn’t work, at least under the current circumstances. I was already young and angry, and the last thing I needed was to fall in love. I saw love as a weakness that gave another person undue power over you. I had recently been through my parents’ painful divorce, and I had no desire to fall prey to the ways of romance.
John remained in my life throughout my high-school years. He was one of the most alive people I have ever met. I think his brush with death as a child created a lust for life in him, a passion driving him to live each day as if it were his last and to treat all of his friends as if they were valued treasures.
When I turned sixteen I started traveling back and forth between Vermont and New Hampshire frequently, and I spent many weekends there in his company. Our friendship always had an underlying thread of attraction in it, but he dated my friends, and I dated his.
When I was seventeen, John and I were at a party together when some guy started acting like a real creep. He kept following me around and was making signs that could only be interpreted as lewd. I attached myself to John at the hip in order to feel safe. One thing led to another, and I found myself going home with him to his apartment.
The next day I woke with my back to him. I could hear him breathing, and I thought, Holy shit, I just slept with my brother. It was the kind of thought that goes through your head when you realize you crossed a line in your friendship that can never be uncrossed. It’s also the kind of thought you have when you are aware of the many ways you know the person next to you.
This was not the first time I’d had sex, but it was the first time I’d had karmic sex. I lay beside him with my mind reeling, knowing we had been lovers before, and that we had also been friends, siblings, and more. I could almost see the many ways in which the strands of our lives had been woven together throughout lifetimes, and it scared me. I didn’t want to love anyone. I didn’t want to make myself vulnerable or feel the need of another person in my life.
Yet over the next few months our relationship became a serious kerfuckel. We had fun together, truly enjoyed each other’s company, broke up multiple times, and always ended up back in the same spot. I have to admit I was not very nice, and I’m sure I was responsible for most of the head games we played. I couldn’t explain my behavior, but just as I knew I had known John before, I also knew we would not be together for the long term. I knew he was going to die.
He tried to make it a real relationship, even driving to Vermont with my friend Stacy to surprise me once. It was a completely awkward moment for me, and I’m sure it was uncomfortable for him too. Instead of being happy to see him, I said, “What are you doing here?” I didn’t mean to be hurtful, but he was such a puzzle. Having him step unannounced into my secluded Vermont world was terrifying. I wanted to keep him over in New Hampshire where I went to play. I couldn’t handle having him in both worlds. If he was in both worlds, I might fall in love, and I couldn’t do that.
No matter how much I tried to look away, I could always see his death. I knew he would die young and that the illness from his childhood would be the cause. When he wanted to introduce me to his family, I said no. When he wanted to show me photo albums of his childhood, I said no. When he wanted to talk about his illness, I said no.
I could see his death so clearly that it scared me. I didn’t want to let myself love him because I knew he wouldn’t stay long. I knew his life would be short and I would be left with tremendous loss.
Our relationship was so complex that I often felt tossed around like a ship on rough seas. When I felt vulnerable, I would stay in Vermont, avoiding the entire state of New Hampshire for fear of running into him. But then I missed him when I stayed away, so I always went back. I could never tell him the truth. That would have been cruel, and I still didn’t understand future sight or fate well enough to know for sure how his life would play out.
Then I met Noel.
24
Meeting My Future
I first saw my husband at a Fourth of July fireworks display. I was eighteen. His best friend had begun dating one of my friends, and we subsequently ended up at the same place at the same time. He was sitting in the back of a pickup truck beside a girl I knew to be his girlfriend. I remember looking at them and thinking, They’re an attractive couple, but they really can’t stand each other.
Within moments of having this thought, I became very ill. In fact, I got so sick that my friend Stacy had to take me home. I am not exaggerating when I say that I had to leave within five minutes of laying eyes on him. As soon as I got home, I went to bed and stayed there for the rest of the night.
I was nauseous, dizzy, and had a piercing headache in the middle of my forehead. I recognized my sudden illness as a psychic reaction to seeing the couple in the back of the truck, but I had never had blowback so severe, and I couldn’t put the pieces together. I now understand that my reaction was so severe because I had just met my future.
A few months went by before our paths crossed again. I had just graduated from high school and was looking to move out of my mom’s house. My sister Sandy had become friends with Noel and said he was looking for a roommate because he and his girlfriend had just broken up. I told Sandy I didn’t think it was a good idea to move in with a guy I hardly knew. I thought it could be an odd situation that would most likely end up with us sleeping together.
A few weeks later, Sandy suggested once again that I connect with Noel. I was looking for a car, and she said he had a Nissan Sentra he was trying to get rid of. This sounded appealing, so I talked to my stepfather about going with me to look at the car.
Before that happened, I ended up at Noel’s apartment at a party his new roommate Steve was throwing. The party was kind of lame, with a few people getting seriously trashed and passing out in the corners. Most of the latecomers were wondering what had happened to the keg. By the time Noel got home from work at eleven, it was pretty much a done deal. I was not among the intoxicated, so I volunteered to ride with Noel as he played designated driver, taking each of the drunks home.