Resonance

A stiff sense of someone hovering right behind her.

All her hairs go straight. Her eyes brim in the periphery where it is.

She refuses to move, feels it staring at her. Her reaction makes no sense in retrospect, but retrospect will wait to kick in.

For now she just wonders what it wants, what it's going to do, staring at her with invisible eyes.

Does it even have a face?

It's a hollow set of contours that seem only slightly opaque. Her heart is racing. She feels like she's dying.

She can feel the numbness run from her legs, feel the chair throb against her veins which throb against the chair.

She isn't breathing.

But it doesn't kill her. It doesn't kill her that she isn't breathing or that the creature is observing her.

Is it even a creature?

Is it even there?

"Go away," she mutters, "I'm just a girl. Just a human. Just leave me alone, please."

But it doesn't leave. It just hovers, stares. Watches. She can't see it but she can. Out of the corners. She's not moving.

It's not moving.

She jerks her head a bit. Just a nudge, a little shift in the vision, in the periphery.

She watches it dissolve.

The room is silent now. She feels the warm sunlight as it passes through the windows. The panes of glass make the air hotter than she knows it is but she doesn't mind. She likes the heat.

Children are laughing outside. The sky is clear and sunny.

She sighs, stands up.

All her nerves tingle with fear and excitement.

She hasn't seen one of them in a while.

Her body is light, light like the ghost or spectre or whatever it was that visited her. Tonight she will call her friend. Tonight they will meditate together. They will stare each other down and forget their egos.

Because she hasn't seen them in a while...

“Sarah?”

“...?”

“Sarah?”

Her eyes are drooping. The stones are cold and solid against her bony rear.

Somehow, she’s forgetting the pain. She’s drifting into sleep in the hot sun with her hands supporting the weight of her head and her drooping, lazy eyes.

Even in the hot sun, she’s falling asleep.

“Sarah, wake up.”

She stutters and looks around.

Nobody’s there.

Her doctor told her she was suffering from tinnitus, possibly from drinking too much coffee or some other dietary issue.

She doesn’t drink coffee, but she lied.

Better then getting put into involuntary care at the MHU. She wouldn’t fill out a Form 42 again.

Better than the cold sharp punch of the needle and the zombie-sleep of her brain in some small bedroom wearing baby blue hospital clothes and listening to a middle aged man talk about ____ as he weaves cigarette smoke in the air.

Things would be different now.

If those things were really watching and listening, not listening like angels, but listening like…observers, like fascinated yet indifferent parties, then yes, events would unfold differently.

She would not stand the autocratic systems that would put her in hospitals and loonie bins and give her medications for diseases that weren’t really diseases.

She would greet the ghosts with smiles when she stopped greeting them with fear.

She needed to stop being scared by them.

It’s a beautiful, sunny day. She wonders why she is falling asleep.

It’s because of the night visits, she knows. The night is the hardest, because it’s the easiest time to greet her guests.

They’re so rare, sometimes.

She’ll stay awake just for them, even if they don’t want to see her.

She’s tried different things to preserve her energy, to change her energy.

More meditation. Less meditation.

Changes in diet. Refusing to eat anything processed. Eating only vegetables. Eating extra meat.

Practicing yoga. Surya namaskar: 108 times.

Kundalini.

Smudging. Sweat lodges. She wasn't an aboriginal; wasn't even a Métis.

Masturbating less, more. Different levels of sexual energy vastly affected her concentration and overall energy.

Refusing to sleep: she had once kept herself awake for two hundred hours without even a wink of sleep. She almost killed her ex-boyfriend with a steak knife, thinking he was a wild coyote—or a stalker. She wasn't sure. His true figure was laid bare whether she knew it or not, although she knew it later. The present—that present, anyway—did not permit her awareness of what the invisible threat had actually been. In a frantic defense he knocked her out with an old cast iron pan and she vomited profusely before sleeping a full fifty-seven hours.

Whatever. Nothing seemed to affect their dispositions. They came when they wanted to. They left when they wanted to.

She hasn’t eaten very much this week. A steady diet of water. Almost only water. Maybe some bread in the morning. Different teas and concoctions from herbs that she gathers on her walks. People don’t know how valuable this stuff is.

She’s emaciated, but that doesn’t concern her.

She’s trying to stop her cycle. Not that she’s seeing anyone.

But she wants to see them. It occurs to her that maybe her period is affecting things. The cycle of hormones is part of the cycle of earthly attachments. The old Buddhists, she was sure, refused women, seeing them too tied to Mara's deceits.

Rigorous experimentation seemed to be the only option.

Save the most dangerous experiments for last. For when she’s the most prepared.

She had finished a meditation retreat with an old friend. They went to study with a Zen guru out in Japan. He was very strange.

Something about him bothered her.

He didn’t answer when she asked about the spirits. The whatevers. The them. He created neither doubt nor resolution. And this was all very in line with what a Zen guru could do or not do depending on their whim or volition, which could arguably not even be their whim or volition.

But that wasn’t what bothered her. Something else did. Something that almost seemed snide. Something very far off from the feeling she figured a guru would radiate. Something uncomfortable, unpleasant, and for all purposes wrong.

She felt that maybe she had been trained inadequately. The spirits were not coming any more or less.

In fact, since she had begun her fast, she had only seen/felt once. Only once after that ghost.

Her stomach growls in contempt of her lotus position. She is stable. Her stomach is just a thing.

She fasts harder. Heavier. More discipline. Less slackening.

She is attempting to yoke. This is where yoga comes from. To yoke.

It is the semantic basis of a spiritual flower. More than just the flower. It digs into the roots, into the soil, into the fire or possibly the void of the earth. Through the magnetic oceans of nothingness. It is the space in every molecule. It defines the space outside the flower.

It doesn’t make sense, she realizes.

But then again, it shouldn’t.

So she meditates.

And starves.

And still, she cannot see the ghosts, who come and go at their own choosing.

They are not, she finally realizes, her servants.

“You are not my servants.

“I am not Sarah King.

“I am a flower.

“A lotus.

“And you are free from me.”

Her space is silent. She uproots herself and lays down her arms.

“Wake up Sarah.”

“Sarah you’re freaking me out.”

“It’s getting cold out Sarah.”

Her eyes flitter. They are not heavy anymore. Nathanial is there, and Jude. They look at her with deepest concern.

She is in the park against the cold pavement ledge that divides it into vertical tiers.

There is mist in Jude’s eyes.

Her body shivers. But she is centred. She doesn’t respond to it.

Her friends' entreaties are strange to her.

“Come inside, it’s cold out here.”

She cannot answer her. No, she can answer, but she won’t.

She does not respond to the cold.

Their voices flatten and fade away.

Her period has not come for three months.

She is completely emaciated.

The sun stands above her.

Her skin, sallow, clings to her bones. Her eyes are sunken.

She collapses in the park, and people mistake her for a drunken hobo. Her appearance is ratty, her skin faded. Empty flasks and plastic bottles surround her.

Mary Ellen, a schizophrenic woman who roams the streets and collects pennies and thrown out dolls. She gives Sarah water from time to time, doing her the favour of pouring it into her mouth.

Mary Ellen is insane, yes. Mary Ellen doesn't even know her name is Mary Ellen. Still, she understands what the young and brilliant girl is doing. Perhaps not brilliant in the IQ way, but brilliant in the glowing way.

Brilliance. Radiance.

She may be crazy, yes, but she sees Sarah King is a star. And not a celebrity star, but a celestial star. A holy thing.

Mary Ellen would tell people for weeks that she resuscitated Jesus with His own Holy Blood. Not long after she would be brought to a Salvation Army shelter.

They would see that she was given treatment, medication. This would not make her better. She could not get better. She was Mary Ellen, and she was crazy, and she revived the Living Son of God.

Nevermind that Sarah was a girl.

Even Sarah thought this was a minor detail.

Mary Ellen leaves for a while. Sarah does not know if she will come back again. She didn't care. It was inconsequential.

Days.

As she faints, she sees them look at her.

Not the people “them”, but the things “them”.

More than one, she recounts. So strange that she should see them when they were not her slaves, her puppets.

So strange that they should come to bid her goodbye.

Lukewarm sterility encompasses her awakening.

Soft sheets draped over her skin.

There is an IV drip in her arm. An oxygen machine.

Jude is at her bedside.

“Oh thank God you’re awake.”

Sarah laughs. “How long have I been out for?”

“Three days. They found you collapsed in the park. How long had you gone without water?”

Sarah shrugs.

She was, sadly, in the earth again. Rooted. Rooted and fed the nourishment of the hospital, like a plant in a pot.

Jude.

“Yeah?”

There may very well be no God.

Jude’s eyes widen. Sarah had not opened her lips.

Jude cries. She buries her face in her hands and she cries.

Sarah squints at the noonday sun and pulls out her IV and lets it droop.

She opens the window and stares outside at the riverfront.

Everything is so fresh and alive.

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