Astral Projection

When I was nine I astral projected and prayed to God every night to let me do it again

When I was nine years old, I fell asleep at my mother’s house and awoke at my father’s in a thick grey mist, feeling heavy and very cold. My body was small then, and my nails were short, so it was easy to remove the stones from my eyes. I was laying on my side with my body stacked evenly; knee on knee, ankle on ankle. In front of me the closet door was ajar. I heard whispering. I knew what was in the closet: my sister’s princess dresses, an American girl lemonade stand, and a large chasm. A dank breeze swelled up from the darkness and with it came memories of crawling. Memories of my parents’ muffled voices, of the hole in the wall between my room and theirs, of pushing past my great-grandmother’s dusty mink coat like it was a boulder.

The sharp points of my body were pressing on each other but I struggled to re-adjust. Even moving my eyes took great effort and concentration. I painstakingly looked away from the closet and towards the middle of the room, where I had built a castle the day before. The yellow and red and blue cardboard looked like stone against the cream carpet. It was missing its drawbridge. From my bed, I could just make out my 22 year old self kneeling on the ballroom floor in a regency-era gown, clutching a potted plant to her stomach. She didn’t seem to notice the water that dripped steadily from the bottom of the pot and soiled her silk dress. She was too busy stroking each green leaf and cooing.

With great effort I moved my eyes lower, because they had begun to tear up. I had seen the past and the future compressed into seconds and my nine year old body felt the pressure of time on all sides as though traveling through a tesseract. The stones I had taken from my eyes had transformed into shells, and I let out a grunt as I crushed them into powder. I slowly inched one arm off the bed, which was just a mattress on the floor, and treated the closeness of the ground as confirmation of my reality. I tried to unstick my knees and ankles, but the universe was folding in and I had seen myself scared and seen myself yearning and though I wanted to get up and float through the wall and find my father, I couldn’t. The feeling of the end cupped my eyes like pearls and when I wrenched my eyelids open again I was falling from my bed into my sister’s pull out mattress at my mother’s apartment. The sea was at the window and my sister lay there, real.

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