It started out as a kid who narrated everything. In the late summer, a line of first graders follows a teacher onto the school yard, and one 7 year-old in that line is internally voicing everything that happens like it's a story she's living. That kid was me. We'll call me Mikah for now. I'd only had a few instances where friendship was an option with anyone, and for many periods of time the one friend i did have was temporarily seperated from me. So, alone on the soccer field among all my classmates who acted like they hated me, I began to tell a story.
In elementary school, if someone had told me i would make a story, one that many could be shown and understand, relate to, have fun with. I would have truly believed it to be an adventure, some story about ghosts and the paranormal. I wrote about that a lot. My family was greatly invested in the spiritual, unnatural and unfaceable. My father and his sister informed me and my cousin our genetic ability to communicate with ghosts and other spirits.
We'd use this ability, spotting threatening spirits in the bedroom and casting it away, sometimes just laughing at it. We weren't afraid of what horror movies were showing, that was our normal. Orbs manifesting over my room, seeing a cowboy in my bathroom, and even feeling the weight of my passed great-grandmother as she sat on my bed.
My father took me to the closet in my bedroom one day, hoisting me up in his arms with how small i was. Barely 50 pounds, if that.
"Hold your arm out, and imagine your energy, your life force, extending out of your fingers. And use that energy to spin this record with your mind." The record hanging by a fishing wire in the closet was completely still. No air flow.
[Within moments of us holding our arms out, and focusing, the record begins rocking around and spinning]
I would have written about wolves, and uprising against terrible powers. I would have written about werewolves and monsters and finding true love after being bullied by your peers.
Middle school was a fresh start from everything. I was told I'd become even more of a person through the 3 years. I expected to be alone, but i knew i would make the effort to connect to people.
"If you could talk to ghosts who would you talk to?"
This poor girl. Did she know? When i remember this moment I always consider, will she ever know what she created?
"Um, i guess my old cat. My dad threw her out because she was going to have kittens. That was like 6 years ago."
"I can help you speak to her again? What was her name?"
[The rise in energy as i write Laric in the center of my binder]
"I'll tell you when i find her!"
I couldn't feel her yet, searching with my mind the sensation of someone named Laric who was due for kittens. Nothing.
A day or 2 passed. Violin practice, math, science. I would sometimes think that i saw something, a cat flitting by or a set of eyes flashing. A simple play of the mind, a totally common phoenomenon in people.
It was hard to comprehend the first time i laid eyes on Laric. It was not as though i could see her in mass in front of me. I felt her, in parts of my body. Like a rush of energy and emotion that radiated from the bench i noticed her watching me from under. She was a cluster of energy i saw with my mind's eye and could imagine in our realm as she traversed it.
She looked back at me, and from such a distance, i began to hear her voice stirring my thoughts as i greeted her.
This voice in my head, the tone, the feeling of it was all as if it had been my internal monolog. I knew something more unique had to be answering me.
"I'm not ready. I don't want to say goodbye. I want to come home with my kittens. Where are my kittens?"
"I'm sorry. We can figure all of that out together. I can talk to your person for you."
[She stares at me, and then I'm interrupted, called in from lunch recess where we were talking]
Such is the way of my life, it would seem a lot that important moments of my time would be interrupted. I continued more and more to spot Laric. Now i knew what to look for, and she followed me everywhere.
