Hello there. I know where I need to go, but first, I need you to follow along for a page or two.
I have a secret.
The last time I told anyone about my secret, they thought I was maliciously lying and I was sent to bed without dinner. You probably figured out in that single sentence that it was one of my parents, and I was but a child, and you would be correct on both counts. My father brooked no forms of jest in our household, and even though I was doused in my own tears, sniveling snot dripping from the tip of my eight year old nose, he thought I was only working to make him the fool. I often am thankful that my father did not believe in physical violence, because I think that night he probably would have beat me to death. Doesn’t matter that I was a girl, I think he would have hit me anyway.
My mother was too drunk to care. Or she was deep in her stamp box, seeing how much LSD it took to shift the walls into noncongruent shapes, abstract forms dancing at the edge of her fingertips as she attempted to commune with the great spirit of the universe.
So my secret has been mine and mine alone for nearly thirty years now. As I got older, I knew that if I told any rational adult within shouting distance of a medical professional, I would suffer a barrage of tests, pokes and prods, metal leads taped to my skull as machines beeped monotonously in the background. I had fears that if someone believed it, only for a moment, that could ruin my life. It could ruin my freedom.
Ironically, my secret ruined my life for other reasons. I was so bathed in my fear of it getting out that I avoided deep friendships, lovers, and even my own family once I moved out. As you could probably guess by now, my own family was shit. But my extended family wasn’t so bad, and at least they made an effort to have a relationship with the only kid that came out of the train wreck of relationship my parents had. Maybe they felt sorry for me. Or maybe they felt sorry for the entire situation. Who knows? Pity was pity, and I did not take much of it.
I wished during many long nights that I could just be honest with a boyfriend. Tell him how I felt, but then at some point, he would discover the truth. I can’t hide it because I can’t fake the reality that everyone else call’s normal.
I don’t sleep.
At all. I have not laid my head down for a night’s rest since grade school. Growing up, that created unique challenges on how to keep myself busy while everyone else slept. I would have to take pains to not be discovered, and the game of it satisfied me for the most part. When I went to University, I had to hide myself, rotating between classes, dorms, and study halls to enshroud the truth. My life had it’s own set of clothes, and depending on where I was, or what I was doing, I compensated from within my fear by being confident or brash. ‘Working late?’, I was asked. Oh yes, of course, I would reply. ‘Pulling an all nighter?’ I would shoot back is there any other way to study? ‘Why don’t you ever go back to your dorm room?’ Oh you know, I see girls. Lots. Of. Girls.
‘Lesbians are hot.’
Sure they are, but I am not one. Just bored and happen to have all the time in the world to think this stuff through to throw everyone off my scent. Including dumbasses in their high school letter jackets trying to pick up a thin girl at the coffee shop who is obviously not interested in their muscle mass. I would love to tell people that when you all are sawing logs, I am acting like an idiot savant caught up in a new passion, discovering anything new to me, attempting to keep myself challenged… and not just binge watching the entire internet since, you know, I seemingly have the time. I mean, I will make time for the latest series that blows up my skirt, and who doesn’t like a little period romance or a good BBC series? But most of the time, I am just trying not to go crazy. Like my mom. Or in his own special fucked up way, my dad.
I often wonder if my mom was actually like me. Maybe that is why she self medicated so heavily. And maybe my dad knew as well, and that is where the anger came from. I would like to ask them, but they died, miserable and alone, while I was off at University becoming the highest ranked student in multiple degree programs. I had professors wonder if I was abusing amphetamines, but they admired the work ethic regardless. I graduated the same way that I entered University.
Alone.
So you may be wondering what has changed here. Why am I opening up on this now? After all these years? I may be a brilliant doctor, a competent surgeon, and a distant mentor to the new residents, but in all of that, I still struggle with any form of intimacy, even of the friend kind. I don’t mind that people think I am just a high functioning autistic, but still, sometimes, I wish that I had someone to talk to. I am not talking about the person reading these words, of course. I am talking about the Other or Others. I am not sure what they I should call them. I don’t think there is a definition or taxonomy for our relationships. They are simply Other.
You may think that I am starting to fracture into disassociated personality disorder, but I am certain that is not the case. I am not schizophrenic, and I am not mentally unstable. I am just different. My neural behaviors are a mutation, allowing for short term and long term memory formation and sensory filtering resets while I am awake. And that is how the Other reached out the first time, when I was resting.
I do not sleep, but my body needs to rest. I have to allow my physical processes to catch up, and my brain is no different. Where you lie down, close your eyes, and shift into patterns of sleep with dreams and somatic bliss, I sit in a chair, stare into the corner of the room, and meditate. My form becomes one with my mind, my breath pulls and pushes upon my alveoli, exchanging gases within my bloodstream, my heart pumping the components for life to all the cells within me. I fall into a dreamlike state, and often, I believe, achieve a REM cycle like those that do sleep. My brain is able to catch up like an awkward gangly long distance runner, and my body is able to adjust into the circadian rhythm that my brain forgot somewhere along the marathon route. I call sleep. But it’s pale imitation, by definition, is no such thing.
Seven years ago, I was sitting in my chair, focusing on my breathing, and I felt the comfort of my meditation take over. I had a long sixteen hour shift at the Hospital, and my body was tired. I let it cascade upon me, a tide coming in after too long of a hot sun, cooling my form in the iterative wash of crash and spray. There in the corner of the room, my eyes fluttered and shifted, and I felt the peace that I needed.
A voice spoke. Calmly, as if it had been calm conversation long before I had shown up.
“…and that is why I need you in my life. To guide me, to provide me a light to my feet. I need your guidance, your care, your love.”
I called out a panicked ‘hello?’ to the air suddenly, my eyes snapping fully open, wondering if someone had snuck into my home, and was for some strange reason, praying in the corner. The voice did not answer, and nothing changed. I got up, wandering the rooms of my house, checking the closets, flicking the lights on and off, and navigating each space, looking for an intruder. There was nothing.
Frustrated, I sat back down in my chair, feeling my way back to my place of Zen. As I approached the calm wash, I felt the voice coming long before I actually heard it. I knew it was not me, not originating from within my own grey matter. It was outside of me, it was Other.
“…I wish you would answer. I wish you would talk back to me.”
So I decided to try, staying in my calm state as best I could, not letting my own thoughts rage upwards and push me from my center. “I can try to answer,” I said to the empty space of my living room.
“What?!”
Her voice, that was a definitely a her. Younger, maybe preteen?
“You can hear me?” She asked.
“I can hear you. Can you hear me?” I asked, focusing as hard as I could on my breathing. The push and pull of the air, the folding and unfolding of geometric shapes, a dot forming a line forming a triangle, forming a square, forming a pentagon, then a hexagon. Stop. Reverse it. The hexagon becoming a pentagon becoming a square and so on. Breath holding at the top and the bottom of the sequence, forcing the peace to run through my veins instead of the blood that wanted to course to carry adrenaline to every cell. I instead focused on ataraxia, a boat on a sea of tranquility.
A tentative answer, timid nearly. “Yes.”
“Who are you?”
She did not answer, and I somehow understood that she had faded away. It must have been her choice. I waited for an hour more, wondering if she was trying to reach back, but unable or unwilling. When the room of silence became deafening instead of comforting, I instead made a second dinner, ate calmly and then headed to my study to workout. Being an nonsleeper is so much easier when you own your own place. No one can notice that you have six meals a day and exercise at odd hours.
The next evening, after I was feeling normal again, I sat myself down at the same time to see if the Other would arise from my place of calm. I focused on my breath, and again, I sensed her before I actually heard her.
“… was scared, I did not know how to respond. Please come back. Please come…” She pleaded.
“I am here,” I asked.
“Oh god,” again, shock in her voice.
“Don’t be afraid.” What else would I say? I had to understand this. My medical brain was whirring in place, trying to sort the conditions, components, and physical state into a sort of running chart, but with a massive wall of focus on my breath and the fragile voice on the other side of my spiritual telephone, it was all but shut down.
“I am afraid.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I can’t sleep,” she said, the admission sounding like a desperate confession.
My heart started to race, and I struggled to hold on to the barely tenable thread of connection in my excitement. Could this be someone like me? I tried, “Insomnia?”
“No, I haven’t slept for weeks now. I can close my eyes, and I think I dream? But I don’t ever fall asleep. My mom is worried, I think. I heard her talking to my aunt about a sleep study. I don’t want to be a freak.”
I could hear the desperation in her voice. She knew it was wrong, but she also knew it was normal for her, and the two competing forces at her heart were pulling her apart. How could you know that it was wrong for everyone else, but right for you? How could you explain it to someone that would never understand? But I could understand. The universe had connected us… or perhaps our conditions did.
“You are not a freak. What is your name?”
“Imani,” she said carefully. “Shouldn’t you know my name?”
“Why would I know your name?”
“Because you are an angel or god or somethin’?”
The confusion came through so clearly that I nearly laughed out loud. “I am not either. I am a doctor of internal medicine in Vancouver.”
“You’re a doctor?”
“Yes. And I haven’t slept since grade school. And I am nearly forty years old now.”
“What? You are like me?”
“I am, I suppose,” I replied. “Tell me about yourself, Imani.”
“I’m eleven, and I live in Queens, New York. I am scared… uh… what’s your name?”
“You can call me Claire.”
“How are we talking, Claire?” Imani asked. Her voice was transitioning from fear to calm, even though a small torrent ran underneath.
I could pick up on nuances in her voice, as if I had my hand on her face like a blind person, feeling the emotion and body language through a different set of senses. It was a bizarre sensation.
“You were praying?” I asked.
“Yes, then I heard your voice last night, and I freaked out.”
“I freaked out too. I meditate to rest my body and mind. I think we connected because our brains were doing similar things. I don’t know anything else beyond that, this is new to me as well.” I could feel her crying over our shared thread, a gossamer connection, silver and bright reaching across the North American continent, and a sense of relief thrummed across it. I knew her feeling, and I assumed she could feel me too. “But we are in this together now.”
“What do I do, Claire?”
“This will sound bad, but you will just have to lie to your mom. You will have to tell her that you sleep great, it was just a recurring nightmare. When you hear her checking on you, deepen your breathing and I can teach you to meditate like I do.”
“I should lie?”
“This is not a malicious lie, Imani. Think of it as a coat that you can take off when you are not outside. Eventually, you will be able to use this gift however you see fit. Right now, I assure you, you are not going to die from this, and you are no less a person because of it. I have been steadily studying my own condition since my residency, and I am at or above every baseline for a healthy white woman at my age.”
“Why can’t I tell her?”
“You might be able to, someday. When you are in control of your condition, and it is yours to share as you see fit. Any doctor she takes you to will only try to medicate you into sleep, and while it may look like your sleeping, you won’t be. Your brain will still be going, you just will be under a heavy blanket of sedation. Ask me someday how my gall bladder surgery went, and I will tell you how to avoid the bad sensations.”
“I think I understand. You’re white?”
“Yes.”
“I’m black.”
“Why would that matter?” I asked seriously.
“Could this be genetic?”
I was impressed. “That is a great thought, Imani. Why would we share this condition if we are genetically diverse?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. Other diseases and conditions can exist in different races. Maybe you and I have a shared ancestor somewhere along the line. Could be a bunch of reasons… and we can work through that together. With two of us, we have more data.”
A sigh of relief over our shared connection. “Can we talk soon?”
“Every night, if you want. Time zones don’t matter, so whatever time you wish during the night,” I smiled.
“K. Tomorrow at 1am my time?”
“Sure.”
We broke off from the connection and I came back to myself covered in sweat. The amount of effort it had taken me was significant, but I suppose like any exercise, it would probably improve with practice.
I continued with Imani all the way through her high school years, teaching her to meditate, guiding and mentoring her when she needed it, and act as a tutor when she struggled in school. She was crazy smart, and she was headed for pre-med on a full ride scholarship. It was like having a little sister or even an adopted child of my own. We made plans to meet in person over the summer, I was looking forward to my trip to NYC. Even with the age difference, I finally had found a friend. After all these years, being by myself, a stranger to all, it was still a unusual sensation to realize that Imani and I were bound together now, hundreds of miles away from each other.
Three weeks ago, we connected at our usual time. She sounded breathless, as if anticipation had built up for so long she was on the verge of bursting.
“Claire. Claire. Claire…”
“I am here, Imani. Why do you sound like you are about to explode?”
“There is another one of us! There is another one!”
That is what I could make out. She was shoving so much thought and emotion over our connection, that even in my calm state, I could not focus on all of it at once.
“Slow down, Imani. Take a breath. Who did you find?”
“I was meditating in the middle of the day, because I wanted to be rested for that final this afternoon, and I made contact with someone,” Imani said breathlessly.
“Who?”
“His name is Stephan. He lives in France, in the Bordeaux region, proud grandfather to four girls and a retired vintner. He was praying… and I heard him just like you heard me.”
My stomach nearly did a flip. One of us is an aberration, two is a coincidence, but three? There may be a pattern here. Something for us to dive further into. The limited testing that I had been able to facilitate between Imani and myself had been limited and constrained to our talks, emails, and occasional snail mail packages.
“Claire? Are you there?” Imani followed up.
“You can feel me, you know I am here,” I replied sarcastically.
“What do you think? Isn’t this amazing? Do you think…”
“Amazing for certain. If there are three, there may be tens, or hundreds, or more even. With 7.5 billion humans, it could be a lot higher even if it is a minuscule percentage number.”
“So why hasn’t it happened for seven years? Why just us?”
“It has to be the state of mind, right? Prayer. Meditation.”
“But lots of people pray. Lots of people meditate. We should be tripping all over each other every time we open up.”
“Was he praying about something specific?” I remembered my first time with Imani. The distance, the fear, but above it all the need to find peace in our strangeness.
“He was praying about being alone, I think. His wife passed last year and they were married for like, ever,” Imani said. “What should we do?”
“Is he open to coming to NYC?”
“You mean all of us together in person?”
She sounded giddy, and I grinned, feeling the infectious nature of her happiness.
I shrugged, “Why not?”
Now perhaps you understand why I am writing this all down. Telling this story now. Sharing my secret to these pages. Because it turns out that after all this time, it was not my secret. Or only my burden. It was all of ours. There is purpose here and now my job is to find it. I am starting these journals to capture it all.
A shared experience that now I know is not only my own. What I have learned through all this so far? Mainly that sometimes you don’t have to pray to have that prayer answered.
And that is something I can believe in.