chapter 1

from weed to utopia to dreams to running a story about triumph over adversity and finding God.

Kelsey sat down and untied her running sneakers. She put on the shoes and stood up and breathed in deeply. Things don't always go the way we plan them, but every little thing will always be alright. It’s that song she always listens for �" every little things gonna be alright. She opened the door and looked toward the sun. The sky had pink and purple hues in it. It was near evening. She listened to her feet as she ran.

            She remembered the day she took the bus to south side to meet her new roommate, Sarah.  She was sitting at the hangout spot that all the hippies went to. They called it temple of the dog, but it wasn't a temple. She smoked weed there and talked and listened; listening, that is something important. Listen to the stillness. Listen for God’s voice, the peace in the middle of all of the chaos. Kelsey continued to run, listening patiently for God's voice. She looked up at the sky, and stopped to stretch her legs. She reached her arms high above her head and then bended over and touched the pebbly ground with her hands. She counted to ten and then, energized, changed her position and stretched more.

            I like to dance. I mean, really dance, in a way that the body is just completely free. I like to flip, too, and move my body to the rhythm of the sea, of the planet I stand on. I breathe in and out, in and out again. I am telling the story. I’ll continue to tell the story. I like to dance, and move my body freely. This is the rhythm, the rhythm of God. I always pause to think about heaven, and how my life will be when I'm there. What it will be like.

            Kelsey ran and dreamed. She thought about swimming pools, and how it feels to slowly slip into water. The clear blue water surrounding her body. She thought about moving her arms, pushing the water gently around her, moving her body. She thought about the rhythm of life. I march to the beat of a different drummer, she thought. Only when she told Kyle, he laughed at her, mocked her. The Kyle that tried to get her to be sexual when she just didn't want him to touch her. I would let Damon touch me, she thought. Maybe. But Kyle was squeezing her butt, and it felt wrong, so maybe it was.

            Night fell. Kelsey found a patch of grass to lay on. She leaned against the trunk of an evergreen tree. Ages ago, she was a tree. A tall evergreen tree, with rich green branches, an eye in the trunk. She remembered being water, dreaming. She thought about dreaming, and started to get afraid that she'll be water again. But you won't. And that was a promise, a promise that she'll never die and never reincarnate, never be water again, never be destroyed.

            She remembered the bitter cold of death. It's just blacking out and waking up surprised. She was meditating and then the devil or a demon told her she was a witch and that she had to accept rotting or becoming blind. She clung to her glasses, to be blind would be terrible. So she thought, I accept the rot. Then Jessica, Jessica-possessed-by-Jesus, came and held out her hand and at first Kelsey didn't hold onto it. But then she did, and while she was eating she was trying to accept a gift from God, but it kept slipping further away. She heard, you have to accept death. Because if you don't, you have to accept destruction.  "I'll find you," a peaceful voice said. So she tried to eat and accept that, that she would die and then be found. Jessica then lead her to the bathroom and she turned the shower on, undressed, and got in. Jessica told her to put her arms up above her head and lean backwards. It was an exorcism; she was possessed by the devil. Sometimes she wonders if Jessica knew what it was she was doing. If she just blacked out and doesn't remember helping her. But then, feeling like she was rotting, dressed in a light blue hospital gown, she sat at a table. She thought she and everyone in the hospital was in hell. Someone gave her an ointment to put on her lips. She felt wrong; she felt like she was rotting and she wondered what she did wrong. She forgot to remember God's promise of salvation to all believers.

            And then she went into her room in the psych hospital and lay down. Then she died. She didn't know it, but she blacked out and ten minutes later, she awoke with a new, immortal body. She didn't know it, but later she was told that that night was death. And that you only die once, and then you either stay on earth or go to heaven or hell. And that you wake up after death, because God raises the dead.

            She lay against the tree. She felt the bark against her back. Neither rough nor smooth. She smiled and looked up. Music played in the back of her mind. She watched the traffic moving on the road in front of her. She poured out all of her stresses, poured out her soul, everything on her mind. Surrendered to God.

            How does a writer write, she asked. She stares up at the stars in the night sky, wondering about the patterns in the sky. There has to be a God, she thought, if the stars have a pattern. The stars are God's artwork. She thought about all of the galaxies that are out there. She thought about the trees and the grass and the wildflowers. She prayed for heaven. She hoped she'll never die. That in five years she would go to heaven.

            The world turns slowly on its axis. Everything that is is. In thought she is back at temple of the dog. There’s a text message from Sarah. "I'll be back," Kelsey said to the hippies she was smoking weed with, yearning to see and talk to Damon. Relenting, she walked the path and finally saw Sarah.

            Sarah was Christian before Kelsey was. Sarah was always blasting Christian music. And there were noises in the apartment, both of them could hear it. Was the place cursed? It was because Kelsey was lost exploring religion, just very lost in all of the wrong religions. Now she's Christian. Sarah helped her, Mike helped her. In the hospital, not the one she died in, but the one she went to when one of the demons was plaguing her. Mike didn't wait for Samey, because Samey would corrupt Kelsey.  She gave Mike her books, because she wanted him to tell her what was alright for her to read, and what wasn't. She was trying hard to be Christian, but she had these other ideas, and they were fictional ideas, that she was hanging onto. Preston, or someone like Preston, told her that on dmt nexus. "You're hanging onto fictional beliefs." But Mike told her, at the hospital waiting room, "God wants us to be both body and spirit." She doesn't remember the exact moment she became a true Christian. But she knows that now she will never be the same.

            I'm not that person that was in the hospital. God transformed me, changed me, helped me, saved me. I'm not her. I'm not a tree, and I'm not Daniel. Once I was Daniel, Daniel a pedophile, but now Kelsey, she wonders, how I could have ever been Daniel? When now all she wants to be is pure, kind, creative, loving, forgiving, patient, compassionate. She became an angel. It was always what she was yearning for. To be an angel.

            She lay against the tree. She sat up and looks around. The sky is darker now. She got up and ran back to her apartment in Pittsburgh. Tomorrow she'd go to the coffee shop and write. Get high first, smoke weed, then she would bring her laptop to Crazy Mocha listen to the music the place played and write, high and beautiful. Getting high was always beautiful. It made her want to talk to God. She talked up at the stars. They have no consciousness, she really is talking to God.

            She wasn't Christian back then, two years ago in Pittsburgh laying in the grassy field talking to God. But for most of her life - mostly always - she believed in God, and it was a long journey to become Christian. And now she is. Christian.

            It's just practice writing. Someday she'll be able to write a novel. If she writes every day, she would improve.

            I have no plot. Just the nonlinear plot of the story I have to tell.

            She gets up and runs back. It's okay, it's alright.

            She turned her key in the key lock. She went in and poured herself a bowl of cereal. She pours some milk in the bowl, too. She sits down at the table and eats it slowly, in silence. She enjoys each spoonful of cereal. She listens to the stillness. She feels peaceful; she feels like an angel. She bows her head and clasps her hands together and prays, God, please protect me while I sleep, and give me wisdom in my sleep. Help me to grow closer to you.

 

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            Kelsey let her mind wander way back to the beginning of her incarnation as Kelsey. She doesn’t remember the little girl that she was, walking holding her mother’s hand. She does remember the screaming between her mom and dad, all of the angry. The dad throwing a chair at my mom and breaking her foot, the mom provoking him, yelling, locking him out of the house. She remembers the chaos, and the hatred.

            She remembered the first time she took a shiny silver razor blade and took it to her arm. She remembers holding her arm out, staring at the pale white skin. She cleaned the blade first and was in the bathroom.  She was now sitting on the off-white tiled floor. She dug the blade into the perfect skin and tugged. A pool of dark red blood formed, decorating her arm. She smiled and sat there, staring at the shiny blood. No one was there to listen to her. She took the stained blade and put it in the same cut, and tugged one more time. After a while of meditating on her own blood, she stood up, dizzy. She reached for the sink and held onto it. She reached for the faucet and turned it on. The water made a loud noise, and she plugged her ears, getting blood in her hair. She ran the water over the cut, the first cut of many. She grabbed a tissue from the toilet and put it on her cut to stop the bleeding.

            Then she went into her room and blasted the radio. It was before they lost the house. In that house her parents bought in Maryland, her room and her sister Jenny’s room were connected by a bathroom in the middle. She listened to Rise, Rebel, Resist by Otep. Then she switched it to Perfectly Flawed. It was a beautiful song. She covered her ears and screamed.

            Leaving the music on, she walked back into the bathroom. She looked in the drawers for a bandaid. Finding one, she put it on her cut and then threw a sweatshirt on and walked downstairs. Jenny was sitting at the table eating a sandwich.  It used to be easy to talk to her, Kelsey thought, but then they grew apart. Jenny always cared about being popular, and Kelsey was an outsider, a loner. That was back when she was in high school.

            Now she is a college drop-out that doesn’t cut herself. Now she is an ex-cutter, an ex-anorexic. Now she is Christian. Now she is evangelical, joining Bible study groups and joining a volunteer program called Earth Angels.

            Back in high school, she would always skip lunch and search for a garbage can to toss her lunch in. Then she would head to the staircase and run up and down them as many times as possible, until she collapsed. Then, revived, she would do toe-touches, wildly throwing her body to the ground arms reaching her toes.

            Sometimes she would look in the mirror and judge the face she saw smiling back at her. You’re beautiful when you’re smiling. You’re beautiful when you hold on. Kelsey watched a movie about cutting, a movie about two girls that loved each other, and it was seductive and held onto her. Now she is chasing away all her fears. She turned to God, and her life shared. There’s a message to share, the love of light, caring about the light in everyone in her path. The light just grows and shines and in the stillness there is the ever-present voice of God.

            Kelsey started cutting the summer before she went away for college. She was just curious, and it fascinated her. She loved simply looking at the color of her own blood. She told her little brother Justin, and then she stopped for a while, because her mom found out. Some things shouldn’t become secret, and some other things are best to stay secret. She never wears longsleaves, and she doesn’t use scar cream. The multitudes of scars on her arms are a memory, a memory of pain and boredom, and mostly, a memory of strength. Home from college in the summer and rambling on melodramatic.com for hours on end, she carved “I am strong” on her left thigh.

            She was strong to hold on. Strong enough to smile through the pain, and wonder if someone would ever look at her scars and think that they are beautiful.

            Now she lives in a small town. She’s a city girl, a girl who could get lost in the wilderness. She wanted to have long black hair curling down to her waist. She had a dream about The Upper Room (the church she was a part of in Pittsburgh) and then she was in a tunnel of sorts and ended up in a monastery. She saw people in a room with white cloaks meditating and they looked so peaceful and beautiful and fully alive, seeking truth. She wanted to join them and then she walked and found the desk and registered. Then she was in a circle of people eating some sort of raw food.  Then she woke up.

            She found meditation before she found God. But in meditation, she realized she had to seek God. It started to be the only thing she could think of. Riding home from The Upper Room with Rachel and Josh, the three people were talking about Christianity and how it was the right, true religion. They talked about God’s grace and love. Kelsey didn’t quite believe at that time, she wandered astray into evil, pagan things. But that day, she said. “It’s all I can think about.” It is a journey: come on home, home to a church, and someday home to heaven. Heaven is home.

 

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            I met a murderer and fell in love with him. I don’t remember why I loved him. I don’t remember what he said to me, but someday I will. I had two chances to be with him, but I messed up both times. And then I told his secret to the whole wide world. I’m not going to publish his secret. I’m not even going to tell you his name. But he stabbed me, so I know that the telepathy between me and him was real, and I can’t read minds, but maybe he can. I heard his secret in my mind.

            He stabbed me, and God gave me a new chest, and then he was hiding out in my basement because it was winter and he was hitchhiking to Maryland to stab me, and he didn’t want to freeze to death. I wish I went down to the basement when God told me he was there. I guess I was too afraid that he would hurt me again, so I didn’t. I’m still afraid that he’s going to hurt me. Yet paradoxically, I can’t wait to meet him again.  In heaven I will meet him again, and he will finally talk with me, honestly instead of lying. Because in heaven there isn’t a government that hypocritically kills murderers. He’s not a murderer, he’s someone who killed. That doesn’t make it who he is. He’s a twenty-one year old boy. He’s an anarchist. Someday he’ll be a Christian. Someday he’ll be an angel like I became an angel. All I know is I will always love him, and in fifty years we’ll be together forever. Our love isn’t like other peoples’ love. We’re not a married couple growing beautifully-old together. I’ll never grow old. He will grow old, and I will meet him when he’s old, and then he will grow younger and we will spend all of our time together.

            We are unique together. Aaron Dottle was a killer too, he killed the man that killed his wife. But that was eons ago. Now he’s a beautiful, loving angel. He helped me. He told me that DMT is medicine, that it helps him with his anxiety. It helps me with my anxiety too. I used to have moments of extreme panic �" reality was something no one would believe in but me, but it was still real, and only Damon and me knew that what he did and was planning to do if the court case opened, was real. No one believes me but I don’t expect them too. I experienced the terror of waiting to be murdered by my soulmate. But now God promises that he will never hurt me, no matter what I do, so I am writing this in my novel. It is a huge part of my story, a part of who I am.

            Aaron Dottle is lovely. He told me “More like an angel” when all of the hippies were sitting outside in southside spanjing for cash. Music was playing. Taylor Phoenix asked me if there was anyone else, besides my murderer, and I looked at Aaron Dottle, smiled, and knew that there was hope, because Aaron was there to talk to when I desperately needed a friend to talk to. My friends were talking about DMT, and Aaron pretended to try to hold the smoke in and not to cough it out and waste it. He was beautiful. DMT is beautiful. I want to know his story. I hope he will tell me his story, and I will tell him mine. In five hundred years we’ll go to Peru together.

            We all walked to the alcohol store and bought alcohol, and then the group started walking towards the staircase in South Side. I was part of the group, and it felt good to be a part of a group. Before that we were playing hacky-satch under a bridge that we walked to from temple of the dog. Ashley was there too.  It was beautiful because although we were strangers to each other, that night we were best friends and brothers and sisters. It will always be that way in heaven. So, we were walking to the staircase and we climbed up it. I felt out of place because everybody but me was drinking alcohol. I just didn’t want it, but there was fellowship, even if me and Aaron were the only believers in the group. Then I told Aaron that I was lost and needed to catch a bus back to Bloomfield. So Aaron and me climbed down the staircase and talked. He told me about a time when he and a group of friends saw a demon. She had long hair and a flowing skirt. Aaron told me that he was terrified. But paradoxically, what he told me helped me to believe in God.

            Last night I had a dream that my brother Peter was becoming an angel. I told him secrets. I forget the rest; when you wake up your dreams and all their fascination slips from your memory. You slowly forget everything that happened and everything you did and everything you loved and everything you feared. It was beautiful, though, and hope I will have more dreams and commit them to memory, fragments of them at least, before they slip away to where dreams go when you no longer remember them.

            Hope is a flower grown and nourished by God. One day I will meet Him face-to-face. For now I am on earth to tell the story that I have to share. Maybe it will help at least one soul, and if my story touched the lives of one malnourished-soul, if my story feeds them, then I will be happy. Happy that I’m here on earth after dying, that I have a chance to write this story. I’m not Kelsey, but Kelsey is the name I am giving to the character I am writing about. There is gray area between what is fiction and what is non-fiction, but I think deep down, that all fiction writers take from their own lives to some degree, and nonfiction can be found deep in-between the lines of most fiction. Most authors have a story to tell, and for me, it either comes to me or there’s a drought, no words to be found. That’s just the kind of writer I am. I know no publisher would ever want my nonlinear story, but I’ll share it with my friends, and that is enough. I don’t write to get published, I write meta-fiction where there’s a third person character and a first person narrator and it’s complex and hard to edit. But it’s simply there.

 

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            She hopes to see Damon again. She hopes to love him forever. When she went back to Pittsburgh, there was a march, and Damon marched beside her. Just like in the other march, before they fell in love, Damon and Kelsey held a banner together in the front of the march. She forgets what the banner said and meant, but it was peaceful and joyful for her to hold it with Damon. That was before he started reading her mind and talking to her telepathically. She wishes, all the time, that they had more than just telepathy together.  That she’ll meet him again, and that he’ll share his time with her. Once she wrote a sign that said, “Smash Fascism Grow Hemp” and Damon said, “You made my day.” The sign was written with green marker and she drew a picture of cannabis on the sign.

            She misses smoking cannabis with a group. The first time she smoked cannabis, she was sitting by the riverfront with Mel and Tim and other friends. Mel said, “Weed is meant to be shared.” And it was a beautiful thing. She cherishes those friendships she made at Occupy Pittsburgh, even though they all fell apart when Occupy Pittsburgh was evicted and over. It lives on in their hearts �" in raves. In punk rock indie concerts. That black girl, Quinn, was there, she was an anarchist, and she said, “Occupy is here, in this concert, because we are free despite the tyranny of the corporations, big money controlling the government and the government seizing anyone they arbitrarily decide to label as “terrorist” and locking them up with no trial. We’re not free while they are in captivity. Just like some of the disciples were imprisoned after Jesus died. They were persecuted for their faith, just like Christians in China are persecuted for their faith.

            Sometimes she goes off on a tangent, from one idea to another. Maybe it’s a small thing, but to Kelsey smoking weed is a form of silent rebellion. She remembers the day that Damon and other friends sat on the bench that said 420 across by the blocked off occupy park and smoked weed together. It was a beautiful form of peaceful resistance. Getting high is a beautiful thing.

 

Author's Note

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