(GE Copy)

Introduction: Chapter 0

“Though the world shall change before you, your soul shall still remain until that time arrives”

Since I was young, I've seen things; unexplainable things, things no one else seemed to notice. Whenever I would bring them up, it would be dismissed. It wasn't important, it was uninteresting, ‘lame’ as they squabbled about TV shows and their favourite fictional characters doing sweet nothing. The woods that once roared now slumbered to the matured eyes with dim coals that glossed over the world. Maybe they ignored me, blissfully unaware, or maybe I distanced myself from them. Either way, I became a loner, as any looser or reject could be. Sober to the earth's essence, I couldn't help but shake this longing.

I would see things in my dreams, so foreign from anything. I often wondered if this is what others dreamed, as if I could ever tell what they dreamt, but for the things I aspired to... To no one's surprise, was swept away yet again with no ambition to intrigue. It was normal, there was nothing special to them, and like everything else it was turned aside unimportant and discarded immaculately: It was like the hand of another force making dusk of their eyes. Yet I have to wonder, what did I see? Sometimes it felt like I had lived that life, with every memory intact like it was my own. Realms undefined by any measure of communication, and infinite expanse; and for once, I could understand the weight of that vastness within me. Then as I awoke, it was stagnant, like my mind could no longer comprehend the emotion and my body was unable to process. These dreams however, are not the only oddities that arose. Keep in mind my last words, when I said there were things I could see. As my life grew and the normality set in, they spread fewer between but the memory of the instances before intensified.

There were times when I was six, walking with family that I would see the hanging head of a creature amidst the path. Sometimes I was afraid, sometimes I would gloss over it no different than a stagnant branch. As I point it out, they saw nothing, as the eyes staring through my soul turned and walked away. Sometimes a motion, a person, a voice, something out of nowhere so loud that you couldn't not hear it and they patronized it. What a darling child they said, claiming a spook, a monster, creep, things so immensely terrifying of thoughts and images while under the tone of humour and sarcasm. To them, it was a joke, so certain of their eyes that I wondered if mine were simply wrong.

I remember roads, trips, hikes in neighbourhoods that lead to places that no one remembers. When Spencer Road lead into an old farm, in a place where now is only houses along Quinpool. Comments made that enticed my whole world, things people said that brought depth, now misplaced, missing in their memory with something more likely sitting in their place. Men of intrigue now rewritten husks in their places as they grew older. Pictures, written words, all wiped to another image as though magically transfixed there. Even things I had said all my life. Items that I bought put in one place, to be found in another. When I returned them, the original already there, the duplicate in my hands. “You always had two” Bullshit. I bought one, it was three for a quarter, and I got a red ball and a blue ball, where did these two green balls come from? I would remember something like that. I wanted three green ones, they bounced and looked like cut gems but mother told me to get three different ones lest I got bored. Board of what made me happy. She told me then, and her story changed now. And once again, the hand that forced the world ripped me from what I knew better than to do. I knew what I wanted, yet I gave in, and now there are four balls. Lucky me. In baseball, you'd walk, I didn't have the luxury.

Some mornings I would wake up before my alarm, it got so frequent that I could count down in my head, and on the dot my alarm would ring. This is the only achievement I was ever really complimented on, though no one seen it, only taken by word. Only me. Because that is something to trust from word of mouth, because what they could see, wasn't.

There are other weird instances, things that caught my eye, and never actually looking into it. Many things, in fact; I wanted to, but like a weird force, I always slid past it subconsciously. It felt like the balls incident, emotionally, before it would happen. Some lingering though in the back of my mind, knowing that as soon as I went for the tweezers or the magnifier glass, it would disappear or in this instance; I would be diverted by something trivial only to forget it not four or five but six separate times. Some, even in the same day. Each with the same internal voice shouting unabided, swept away like a slick slope and it made me sick. Sure enough, it wasn't meant to be. Each time, hovering over top, my mind fell blank like white noise... Knowing it would happen again before I even picked up the tools to investigate. And sure enough, someone asking if I'm okay, putting my dreams away as I nodded and walked ashamed.

These instances were the ones that faded, though there are plenty of other stories that would send shivers under your skin; people doing things in front of other people, people I’m with, bloody blundering witnesses –I saw a babies head that turned full turn. Somehow I knew he would, dismissing it, only to be proven wrong. They never saw it. People we met, talked to, figmented. Though I had intensive conversations with them, we turned the corner in conversation, and my parents or friends had no recollection of me even spouting a single word... And yet we arrived somewhere different as a result. They wanted to go to the bakery, we ended up at Fosberries, where we never went due to the extortionate price for a cone and some cold cream. When I asked, they said ‘that's where they were going’ even though we went off the beaten trail to go to the bakery and turned one eighty. Some times I wonder about that man, friend of the family? Only reason a grown man would speak so eagerly with a child in front of it’s own parents. No one remembers him, of course, even I struggle to remember his face at times.

Now the oddest things that happen seem normal, and I guess it's just conditioned. Some times I wonder if everyone saw these too, and like me, just accustomed to it: Only difference being, I had the attention to notice these occurrences as anything else than menial. The more logical it seemed, the more it was like I always had it, erasing the event from earlier but the memory retained.

As I grew into my circle of outcasts, the oddest things began happening. Gradually, the oddities I saw weren't alone. Maybe I confused the two, as the world misshapen but before long they admitted having seen such weird occurrences also. Though they should be frightened of the things I've seen, they only became more interested. Then again, their rather odd people. Zackery, who's uncle would call him Lee, because he swore Zack was reincarnated from him, was rejected from most circles... Potentially due to his involvement with me, associated or otherwise infected with 'the vision'. The other was Sophie, who is an oddity in and of itself, and for all intensive purposes might as well have been an alien. Or an undiagnosed autistic, with a side order of every other 'istic' put into the same blender and turned on high. Sophie just accepted the oddities and moved on. In fact, it took us forever to know she saw anything due to her attitude, until we realized that she seen probably more than me or Zack combined. In fact, she practically lived it.

All of this, in our tiny circle would one day be truly realized, in the fever dream that awaited us... And Him, who I had forgotten, returned to flush into my veins once more.