Flow
I was normal. I was normal for like sixteen years. Then things just started happening to me. I probably didn't notice it the first few times. I don't remember exactly when I decided I couldn't ignore the coincidences anymore. It certainly had to do with my period. It's that clichéd idea that a menstruating woman gains temporary supernatural power. Broken windows, stuff falling off shelves, electronic equipment issues...like I said, all the clichés.
The thing is, before lately, it wasn't that often. My mom and I had a joke about a ghost being in the house, but we're both rational people and we're both clumsy, so we've never thought twice about opened containers or broken glassware.
Then I had a very "Carrie" like incident that creeped the hell out of me. I was sitting in my room, and I had a college interview the next day. I was really nervous. I was going over all the typical interview questions and making sure I had a good lengthy response for each one. It was already really late at that point, and it occurred to me that I didn't know what I was going to wear. I sighed and started thinking about it. Dress? Pantsuit? Light Casual? Casual? Should I wear stockings? Do I have the right color stockings if I wear my navy skirt? Do I have any stockings that don't have runs in them?
Just as my mind switched gears back to the oral questions, I heard this awful kind of "furniture on furniture" groan from the direction of my dresser. When I looked over at it, I saw that a drawer was open. Nothing big, just three or four inches.
My thoughts stopped dead. I didn't see it, but I heard it. This wasn't a soda bottle or a milk jug or anything like that. There's no "pressure" inside a dresser drawer that would make that happen. So maybe it was a big "bump," I figured. Maybe mom was moving her pottery equipment. When I looked over at the string hanging from my ceiling fan to confirm this hypothesis, it was completely still. And other than the sound of the drawer itself, there was no other sign of disturbance. The house hadn't moved...just that drawer. Begin serious freak-out mode.
I walked over to the drawer slowly, looked at it a second, and then slammed it shut with a slap from my hand. I looked at it like an idiot for a minute, challenging it to pop back out again. Once I was convinced of how stupid all of this seemed, I sat back down and returned to my college prep work. Or tried, anyway. The drawer was the first experience that made me start seriously considering this "poltergeist" crap. I did some reading, and it was all the usual stuff. Girls at the age of puberty...stressed teenagers seem to be the most common agent...objects flying or breaking...uncontrolled and mistaken for haunting...
I was kicking myself every step of the way for even reading any of this nonsense. If this stuff was as common as the books made it out to be, there would have to be some peer reviewed evidence of it, right? I looked back at the drawer. I couldn't explain it. I chalked it up to the furniture settling, but I didn't really believe that.
For the first time, I admitted to myself that something happened, and I couldn't explain it. My hero Carl Sagan would say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I might not be able to explain an action this one time, but that doesn't mean that something paranormal is going on. Eight months down the line my boyfriend broke up with me. While I was on the phone crying to a friend, my computer crashed. I mean crashed, too. Overheated itself and didn't shut down. The techs said the computer overheated for sure, but that the safeguards that usually shut the computer down before it overheats its core just "didn't work".
I got a new computer, but I kept thinking about what happened. How could the safeguards malfunction?Why didn't my computer shut itself down before the core burned out? It was number two, but it still wasn't enough. A drawer moved (I thought), and eight months later my computer fried itself. Both are in times of stress, though I could argue that all the time in between was just as stressful. The signs were there, but they were months apart. It wasn't PROOF. I wasn't going to be taken in by this nonsense until I had something real.
But I have to admit--after the computer crash, I was looking. I was waiting for the next thing to happen. Nine more months went by, and I was in college. I had pretty much just forgotten about all of it when something big happened.
My roommate Jenna was kind of big into this guided meditation thing, and after like a month of being in school I would come home really stressed. I kind of pegged her as the indirectly-scold-you-by-acting-morally-superior earthy girl, but she was really sincere and supportive about my mood swings. She was really good about staying away from me when I was in a bad mood, and it wasn't until I asked her...
"How the hell are you in such a good mood all the time?" She smirked at me.
"Well, it's not really that I'm in a good mood...it's more like I'm just changing frequencies really really slowly." I must have frowned at her. She was trying really hard not to laugh, and I could tell. I got more and more pissed off at that smirk until I said,
"I'd like to slap that smile right off your face." And without a beat,
"But this isn't really about me, is it, my dear?" Now Jenna's expression was neutral, but confident. I cracked a smile because of it. She just oozed charm, and she wasn't going to be disturbed by my growling. There was something kind of submissive and dominant about it.
But I digress. She convinced me to do a guided meditation with her. She said that instead of bottling up the anger and shooting it out, I just needed to let it flow.
"It works the same way with anything," Jenna said. "When you say I'm always in a good mood, you mean I never crank the volume all at once. I get angry, but it happens slowly and the energy is more evenly distributed. I get angry, but not stressed. Know what I mean?" I nodded and started breathing deeply. "The first thing you have to do is focus on your breath," she continued in a soft voice. "Don't think of your classes or guys or tests," she said. "There is you, your breathing, and the sound of my voice."
It was nice. I never got into meditation before, but Jenna's voice was right for it. So even and warm. She let words slide out as she breathed with them. "Now as you breathe in, I want you to tense up your body, starting at your toes and going up as you inhale. When you exhale, relax your muscles and move all that tension into the ground."
I tensed my muscles as I breathed in. I tensed my trunk, my arms, and my chest. Just as my neck tensed up I began to shake. "Now breathe out and relax..." said Jenna as I let out the air in my lungs. It was amazing. I felt everything flow out of me and into a kind of cushion beneath me. I pushed all my tension down through me and into...
Jenna's eyes widened, and she pulled away like a scared animal. It only took a second to for me to look down and put the sight beneath me in line with the sensation beneath me; I was floating. It was only about three inches or so off the ground, but just the same, it happened. What was more was that Jenna saw it happen, and she even reacted before I did.
She was hysterical for a while, but when I calmed her down I got her to maintain her story. She saw what I saw and felt. I levitated. I explained all the rest of the events to her: my computer burning up, my drawer opening on its own, all the little things--the broken glasses and accidents when I was younger...
She acted really strange for the next couple of days and then, at the end of the week, abruptly announced that she was leaving school. She confessed to me, weeping, that all the psychedelics she'd taken had finally made her consider professional help. "If you think you really have special powers," she said, "then you'd better get help too."
I was heartbroken. My college roommate--the only other person who witnessed this nonsense--left school because of my delusions. What happened that day made her snap so badly that she couldn't bear to live with me anymore. I felt alone and crazy all over again; I became withdrawn and miserable. I was cold to my new roommate and I got more fed up with school. I was far angrier than before, but I didn't care now. Jenna was gone, and I never wanted to think about meditation again.
Two more months went by, and that's when the interesting stuff started happening.