H is for History

It wasn’t until I met Wisp that I understood the everdreams. I was floating along, having a look at the people still roaming around the circle when all of a sudden I felt … wrong. It was like I was blue and red had suddenly been introduced. It wasn’t like a toxin had come into me, just something foreign and, really, that was scary enough. It passed in an instant, although I shivered for a long time afterwards. Straight after the sensation had gone I felt a voice. It wasn’t hearing; I could hear the world like you would as a living person. It was feeling the words; as though they were raised and I was touching them even though I knew I wasn’t touching them.
‘Hi, I’m Wisp. Sorry about running you over like that.’
‘That's okay. I’m Josie, I guess.’
‘That’s a human name. Did you get to keep yours?’
‘I guess so. No one has spoken to me before so I don’t know if I’ve broken any rules.’
‘There aren’t rules that I know of, it’s just that when I got here I couldn’t remember my name so I gave myself one that seemed to fit what I was.’
‘Are you dead too?’
‘I think so. No one’s told me that either but I know I’m not like those people down there.’ Wisp flashed images of living people through me to illustrate her point. It was wonderful to fully see a someone’s point of view, I was entranced with how Wisp’s colours were different from mine. They saw the world through a light pink filter. I thought I saw the world unfiltered but now I wasn’t so sure.
‘Hey, that trick you just did. I had that happen to me before. But it was all images about my family.’
‘You must have hit an everdream.’
‘It showed me my grandparents as kids and then it showed me some kids I didn’t know.’
‘The everdream shows you the past, present and future. You probably saw kids which were connected to you but haven’t been born yet.’
‘Are they common, these everdreams?’
‘They come and go. I once saw three in one day. Then none for a week.’
‘Were they about you?’
‘No. At least I don’t think so. I don’t remember who I was. I’ve seen a lot of different things, though, and I’ve seen them in a lot of different places. It’s unlikely they were all about me.’
‘What did you see?’
‘I saw a woman crying as people stormed the Berlin Wall. I saw a device hidden in a cave, it spoke to me in words I didn’t know. It spoke like we’re speaking now. I also saw a man washing his car light blue car in the sun.’
‘Past, present and future.’
‘Exactly. The man washing his car was the first clue I got to who I was. I didn’t know the man, but I knew that his car was a Mazda MX5 coupe with alloys and a six cylinder engine. I guess I liked cars.’
‘So, we can find the past.’
‘Yes, and that’s what I’m looking for; my past.’
‘Can I come with you?’
‘Of course. I don’t know how many more of us there are but I could use some help. Sometimes the past is a tangle.’

G is for Golden Ratio

I don’t know who you are except that you are the person who is reading this. But a part of me feels like I know you, or that you know enough about me now to know me. I’m not sure if this knowledge can be sent only one way. It makes sense that when you take on information from me that I should get at least some residual part of you back. Even if that doesn’t make sense to you, I feel it. Every time you read this I feel something coming back from you. That’s part of the reason why I am still telling you this. The other part is that I have something to share with you and I think it’s time you knew it.
You must have realised by now that I can’t speak. I do, however, have the memory of language. I’m writing these events as best I can from memory because it wasn’t until much later than this that I developed the ability to write. Sometimes it’s the things you can do effortlessly in your other life that take the longest in this one. Enough about me, though. I want to tell you something I’ve learned.
If you’ve studied maths then you know the golden ratio. If you’ve ever opened your eyes then I’m sure you’ve seen it, whether you are aware of it or not. It’s the basis of everything; the Fibonacci sequence (remember when everyone was reading Dan Brown), the shell of a snail, the tines of a pinecone. They all conform to it. That’s what troubles me.
You see, it’s easy for the living to forget that they are, in fact, living. Occasionally you’ll be aware of your pulse, your heartbeat. Rare occasions when the sunset is too perfect, or those diamonds in the night sky make you feel small. That’s when you notice. I am not living, and it’s a condition that, as it is new to me, I’m very aware of. Now that I am not living I can look on the living as an outsider, something that at first stung me in a place where I imagine I would have eyes. I am gaining the ability to accept my condition, though, and as I do I notice things.
Just as the golden ratio is present throughout nature so it is present throughout people, as people are from nature. Just as the golden ratio provides that things start small and get bigger so do humans. You don’t merely grow, though, you expand. The race expands. What I need to share with you is a question that bothers me: what happens when the human race expands beyond the planet’s capacity? From a speck of dust to a sandstorm, we are the golden ratio.

F is for Friction

The everdream continued but it took on a different shape. It had started out brown and golden, as though memories were like photographs and could be turned sepia with age. It then progressed a vivid blue as the dream moved into the recent past. The future, though, that was silver. Not a depressing grey but glimmering swirls of silver-white that shone and sparkled. There were a boy and a girl, neither of whom I recognised. They were playing in a room with alphabet decals on the wall and green carpet on the floor. It wasn’t a room I had seen before (the green carpet made me want to puke to be honest) but the kids seemed comfortable there. They seemed to be around the same age which made me suspect that they might not be from the same parents as they didn’t look like twins. The girl was slim with light blue eyes which shone as she ordered a yellow robot around the room. Another thing I hadn’t seen before: the robot appeared to be voice controlled. The boy, the darker of the two with brown eyes and dark brown hair, yelled at the red robot. In the middle of the room the two robots clashed. No damage was done but the little girl was not happy about her robot being waylaid. She ran to the door in her dark pink tights, light pink skirt and blue t-shirt and threw the door wide. Her lungs were certainly healthy as she yelled ‘Mum!’ so loud that I looked around to see if anyone else had heard. There was no one around. In the everdream Mum came in and told both of the kids to play nice. I wondered why this had been part of the everdream that I was watching. Every part up to that point had been about people who were connected to me. Now I was seeing a stranger telling some kids off? It didn’t seem like it belonged there.
I didn’t have time to wonder, though, because the dream had shut itself off. I was left hanging over my grandparents’ grave bewildered. I felt green, like the carpet in the last part of the everdream. I felt full - as though too many things had been absorbed by me during the dream. There was something not right in that dream.
I was shaken from my thoughts as my mother arrived at the grave with her pup in tow. She began to fuss over the old flowers which were there from her last visit. She replaced them with new ones from her garden and wiped over the area before sitting on the edge. I’d seen her here many times before, in my old life, and I knew that the pain was always present here. I watched her wipe away a silent tear, knowing that we were both holding the internal clashes of pain and loss. We were joined in friction.

E is for Everdream

I turned my back to the park and headed up the street on which my mother’s house stood. I still couldn’t remember the colour of the roof so I counted the houses on the left, counting by twos on the odd numbers so I would know when I got to her place. It turned out that I shouldn’t have worried so much — I could see my mother’s car in the driveway. I zoomed quickly by the windows, seeing as much as I could of the interior without staying in a fixed place. I didn’t want her to see me and be scared, I just wanted to know that she was okay. When I got around to the backyard I realised that there was no way I would find her here. Her dog was not in the yard so that meant she must be walking with the dog and I knew exactly where to look.
Some people might think it macabre that she walked the dog at the local cemetery  but mum had always found it peaceful. I remember a few years back when my sister and I offered to take mum out for lunch for her birthday and she told us that the only thing she wanted to do was walk the dog. I hadn’t been to the cemetery for a while even though my grandparents were buried there. I didn’t like the idea of visiting the bodies they no longer inhabited as a form of remembrance. When I wanted to think of them I would rather dredge up a childhood memory of them than look at cold stone with their names on it. When I reached the cemetery I decided to go to my grandparents grave. Part of me was curious to learn how I would feel about visiting them in their place of rest (although I’m not sure you could call my condition rest as I had just flown three-quarters of the way around the world). A larger part of me hoped that perhaps they might be hanging around there too. Maybe they knew that their daughter, my mother, was nearby and maybe they had decided to visit her too. I looked at their grave from above, recognising the marbled grey stone and white chips with flashes of quartz that caught the sun and glinted light into the tears I would inevitably shed during my visits here. There was no one here, alive or ethereal. As I was alone I swept a little closer to better examine the site. I was hovering above the modest headstone when the everdream hit. I call it that now but then I had no idea what had happened. I tingled all over as though I were in the middle of a Tesla coil. I felt like I had turned a piercing light blue even though I had no colour that I was aware of. Images rapidly flipped through me; extremely fast but I could see all of them clearly and in detail. Some were old — I saw a girl in full colour running down the street to a woman. The girl, I knew from a sepia-stained photo my mum kept, was my grandmother and the woman was her mother. Then a man in an army uniform, proudly straight-backed with black wavy hair pushed from his forehead by a wet comb; my grandfather as a young man. The thing about everdreams is that they don’t just show you the past, though. They show you ever - everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen. I didn’t know that at the time, which is why I was too late.

D is for Degrees

Where do you start when you have the whole world to explore? I had probably missed seeing around ninety percent of it in … I guess you’d call it my previous life. I wanted to go to Mexico and see the day of the dead (no pun intended). I wanted to go to Antwerp and look at the fields that Van Gogh painted. I wanted to go to London and watch the filming of the new Sherlock series or go to Wales to watch Doctor Who. On reflection there are two reasons I’d make a terrible Time Lord. One is that when presented with the world on a plate I wonder where the televisions are, and the other is that I couldn’t decide where to go on one tiny planet at one time.
I did make a decision, though. I’m not sure how long it took because even this high up the sun doesn’t move very quickly. I wanted to see the people I loved; those who I had left behind.
I began to circle the Earth to the right. I guess I did that because I used to be right-handed. If I had’ve been left handed or better at geography I probably would have saved myself about a day’s travel but I guess none of us can ever know everything.
I started to zoom in on the country of my birth and death. A place I had once considered to be my little corner of the Earth. I guess I was kidding myself on that as none of us are here long enough to consider ourselves anything more than a brief visitor, an acquaintance of a planet far older than our minds can comprehend and with a longer future than we can see. If you’re curious to know what it’s like to find places while flying at a low altitude then go to google maps, zoom and remove all of the street names and other indicators of place. Nothing looks like it did when I had walked those streets. I couldn’t even remember the colour of my mother’s roof. I could have dipped lower but I wasn’t sure if I was visible to people, even though I couldn’t see me. I didn’t want to cause any unnecessary heart-attacks.
As I roamed above the houses I watched the people. A little girl being pushed on a swing by an old man, the girl screaming ‘Higher, Papa!’ while Papa did his best to comply with her wishes without putting her in danger of a broken bone. At the same playground a small boy, perhaps two or three, with golden curls, flushed cheeks and bright blue eyes is helped by an older boy with matching curls and eyes across a rope bridge. The young boy poked his tongue out of the corner of his mouth while concentrating on getting across while the older boy kept his eyes on the younger ones progress, ready to catch him if required.
On a bench away from the play equipment an old woman sat and threw bread to hungry ducks. They were all degrees of people, some further around the circle than others. I was a degree, too, but I was a degree on a sphere; the sphere we are unaware that we are on until we move outside of the two dimensional circle.

C is for Convex

It’s an odd thing, trying to move without a body. The air feels like quicksilver and it seems to collect and swirl around whatever I am. I looked for reference points. A song popped into my head: ‘I hate to admit it, that’s my reference point, but there it is’. I didn’t know I knew songs. It sounded ethereal, wispy. I wasn’t sure if the original recording was like that, if my memory had made it like that, or if there was something to do with my current form that made sound like that.
I decided that I had flitted enough; time to focus. I looked across the ink sky and found Mars - it’s the bright one that doesn’t blink and looks a little yellowy. I kept my eye on it while I thought of moving. Mars stayed still. I looked at it again and pictured an old-school joystick in my head. You know, the ones they used to have on Ataris.  I moved the joystick to the right. Mars still didn’t move. Maybe I couldn’t move at all. It made sense that I would need some form of propulsion.
I closed my eyes and ordered my brain to examine myself. I wasn’t sure that I had a brain but thoughts were coming and going so I assumed that whatever I had, brain would be a good word for it. I was already adapting to being a something in the middle of nowhere, so it was better that I used a familiar term. As my brain tried to process me I began to feel tingles, as though nerves were reaching out in all directions. That was good. It meant that I had form and that the form could sense.
I focussed on Mars again. This time I tried to push the tingles over to one side of me, hoping that the tingles could exert some force. I kept at it for more than a minute before I felt it. I felt it before I could see it. It was just a small shift, but I had definitely moved. I looked at the planet and tried again, my excitement building as I saw that I was moving in relation to the planet. Internally I felt laughter, but I couldn’t produce it on the outside. I began to twirl, I tried doing flips. I felt like I had felt when I was a little kid. Those days when doing a cartwheel felt like the coolest thing on the planet. The utter freedom of throwing yourself around without fear that you will be hurt.
I turned to face the sun, basking in it’s golden warmth as tendrils of heat shimmered around me and caressed my form. Then I turned my back to the sun to look at the Earth - tiny and enormous as though I was viewing it through a convex lens.

B is for Books

Books. The last thing I saw and the only thing I remember. My favourite stories from a life filled with stories float across my vision, partially see-through as memories often are. The hours I lost to those stories, the magic I gained, the incredible ability to destroy the outside world and creep inward into imagination while also jumping outward into the writer’s story. I suppose there were other things about my life. I guess I had a family, at one time or another. I know there must have been a mother and father involved at some point. Whether they were together or united in a test tube they must have existed. I felt a strange glow take over whatever I am now. I must have had friends too. The glow continued so I guess they were very important to me too. So, I was a person of books, family and friends.You must lose everything except your final thought when you die. Or, you must only have that in your conscious thought. The glow made me think that there were still memories in me of my life, but that they were buried too deep for me to access them.
Buried. I remember that word. That’s what they do to you when you die. They bury you while you deal with buried memories. They don’t know, the living people. They don’t know the synergy of life and memory. I do now.
For the first time I look around myself. I’m not sure where I am. There are no white clouds or half naked cherubs, there are no flames and satyrs. I seem to be just hanging out in the clear air. The sun is out. I look at it and for the first time in my life I’m not blinded. Sorry, I should say for the first time ever I’m not blinded. It’s quite pretty when you can see it properly, golden and roiling like a lightened version of magma. Or like the bouncing golden curls of a child. It’s not scary, just awe-inspiring. Impressive, perhaps, but even that word doesn’t do it justice. I look down. I’m further away than I thought from Earth. I can see the water and the land, the curvature of the horizon. I don’t know how I got up here. Perhaps souls, if that’s what I am, are not supposed to be conscious. Maybe I had a little problem with icing on the way up and it woke me up. Maybe I was supposed to become a star and now there is a star missing because I’m hanging around down here. Hanging around? I wonder if I can move.