recalling sight

There was a time, during my early troubled teens, when I could actually see things that weren't there.

At the peaks of angst and personal sorrow, trapped in a house where love was a four-letter word, I could see things at the periphery of my vision. Moving shapes of indeterminate color, rushing away when I focused on them. But I never felt fear or dread, nothing peculiar at all.

I asked myself what I could be seeing? Elementals? Spirits? Hallucinations?

I never considered myself psychic in any way, despite the fact that my mother is very gifted. I never bought into the talking Sto. Nino, the augeries of cards or communicating with the dead. However, I did respect the fact that there were things I simply did not understand - and their existence did not depend on my understanding or acceptance (hence the innumerable books on the supernatural as well as crackpot theories on everything from the Templar's lost Grail to the secrets of Roswell to lost civilizations).

There was a time when I was frightened though. One evening, I looked into the full-length mirror in my bedroom. The lights were out but I could make out my poor reflection. At least I thought it was my reflection until it moved while I kept still. There was another person behind the glass, darkly. No one behind me, only in front of me. To this day I cannot remember the face. In fact, I think it did not have a face at all. If it did have one, my fear has erased it - because there are certain things not worth thinking about, if only to keep from decompressing my fixed and compressed reality. Really, who has time to be a Spirit Questor?

That was my most blatant act of sight. As I grew older, whatever little sight I had faded until I am as I am today: seemingly blind.

But once in a while, I do see something. But the message is short-circuited by a logic trap set into my brain, flushing out the absurd, and leaving me only with the slightest of shivers as I continue walking or writing or smoking a cigarette.

There is no doubt that there are worlds beyond my ken. But right now, the only ones I care to inhabit are two: the one with Nikki and Sage, and the multiple realms of imagination.