And Some Have Greatness Thrust Upon Them

* The title is a quotation from William Shakespeare.

Elise tucked the two kids into bed. They were 5 and 7 now, and after a year of babysitting for them they still had the old habit of sleeping in the same bed. They both had angelic blonde hair falling into their faces. A boy and a girl, though in the darkness of the room it was hard to tell them apart.

“Do you believe in God?” June's wide, blue eyes opened. Elise had thought she was asleep.

She chuckled. “I don't really know, honey.”

“Why not?” June frowned.

Kids were hard to please if you didn't answer all of their questions.

“Well, I've just never seen any evidence of ...something like that. I suppose it's not something I think about a whole lot of the time.”

June seemed disappointed.

Michael peeped up, a precocious 7 year old always willing to share his knowledge. “I read in the Bible that if you don't believe in God, you don't get to go to Heaven, where the saved people go. You actually get sent to Hell, to burn on fire with the Devil and all of his creatures in eternity.”

Elise tried to shush them. “Michael, it's not good to think about those things before bed.”

“If I ask you to believe in God, for me, can you?” June asked. Her plump face looked at her expectantly.

Elise felt her heart soften. The 5 year old was looking out for her so-called spiritual welfare. “Ok. Yes. I'll believe in God from now on,” she tried her best to show a sincere smile.

That seemed to appease the little girl, and the brother and sister settled down. Elise walked out of the yellow bedroom, gently closing the door and facing the light of the hallway. She didn't mind babysitting, but to be honest, sometimes Michael and June, out of all the others, really stressed her out. It was their intensity. How they meant everything they said, and believed grown-ups did too. How decent and how much better they were than her. She almost felt a flash of anger as she sat on the couch and took out her phone, scrolling through Instagram. It wasn't long before Elise was utterly distracted by the glowing faces of those she barely knew and those she didn't know at all. She looked at how many likes people got for a certain photo. She looked at how many followers the really attractive girls had.

* * *

The next morning Elise sat and watched the news. It was more depressing facts about the instability of the economy, the government doing all they could for Covid 19, the truckers and the protestors who were actually serious, and wouldn't stop. She ate her frosted flakes and made instant coffee as the TV blabbered on. It was good to have white noise, to have someone talking in the background. Otherwise the whole new apartment held disquiet, and she'd fidget with her hands and not know what to do.

Elise looked at her figure in the mirror. She sighed and swore, briefly. Simply not good enough. She'd gained more than several pounds after coming out of her final year of university, and though her friends assured her you couldn't tell, Elise grabbed her iPod and her headphones and headed out for a morning run. She was listening to the old stuff. The songs she actually liked. Katy Perry's E.T. And then as the song changed to Wide Awake, her mood felt young and innocent as she glanced at the thawing grass on neighbourhood lawns. Maybe today would be a good day. She didn't see the car coming round. She was almost singing along, despite how she was usually conservative and self-conscious, when a horn blared and before she knew it...something heavy hit her from behind and she stumbled into a ditch.

Her head hit the ground.

Pure, visceral pain. She couldn't move. She tried to say something as a concerned guy with a beard got out of the car that hit her, but all that came out of her mouth was a choking sound.

“Oh my god oh my god, I'm gonna call the ambulance right now!” the guy stuttered. He looked like a decent person who had just made a mistake.

* * *

Elise spent two weeks in the hospital. There was damage to her skull that got repaired through surgery, but no damage reported to her brain. She felt the world slow, and the moments felt like eons of time stretching out before her. She spent the days sitting on the blue blanket on her hospital bed, shutting her eyes or looking out the window. It was during that time that strange things started to happen. She had daydreams. She had never been the type for fantasies, to really fill her mental space with things that weren't there. But now, all at once, beautiful images came to her mind. She imagined a garden full of white lilies, so many that it looked like snow, and they were all ruffling in the breeze, and she could smell them. She imagined music. She made up symphonies in her mind that were full-length. An hour composed of 5 different movements, complete with a moving refrain from the strings section in her imaginary orchestra that her mind had just randomly invented.

The light through her window was doing odd things. She had never seen the sunlight so bright before. Just looking at it gave her a warm glow all over. As though everything was alright. She couldn't remember, in her adult life, ever feeling that everything was alright. And the absurdity of the life she'd been living came up to hit her in the face, so much that she started laughing. How could she have been so unaware? So desensitized to life? Life was happening! It was in the greenery of the trees down below the hospital floor she was on, in the stillness of the lake behind the city buildings. Life itself was a miracle, and she almost felt she could hear its song. The earth, the world, was singing.

When she was released from the hospital, Elise walked through the different city blocks. She stopped for a coffee and asked the barista how his day was. He seemed pleasantly surprised. She passed a homeless man, and went back into the cafe and ordered the most delicious-looking sandwich and a hot chocolate. She gave them to the old, shivering man with a 50 dollar bill hidden inside. He smiled and said something in a scratchy voice that she couldn't hear. “It's alright. It's going to warm up soon,” Elise said. It was March, and the wind was still chilly. She took her jacket off and handed it to the man. He cried out, and began to pray, with his hands together, murmuring names of the saints over and over.

Her babysitting job changed. She felt excited at seeing Michael and June again. After their parents left one Monday to go on a date night, she rushed to them eagerly and said, “Guess what?”

“What!” June asked, her smile aglow, already picking up on Elise's new, contagious happiness.

“You seem really happy,” remarked Michael, a bit more solemn.

She picked both of them up and squeezed Michael's cheeks. “The believing in God thing,” she said. “It worked!”

They listened to old fashioned 50's dance music on the radio that day, and danced around the kitchen, sliding across the newly wiped floors in their socks. She listened to Michael read one of the stories he'd written. It was about the royalty of ancient Egypt, and he knew surprisingly a lot, for a little boy. She liked it so much she asked him to read it again.

“Elise?” asked Michael, when it was bedtime. “Can you always be like this?” His eyes looked up at her, light brown orbs, pleading.

“Yes,” she said. “I promise I will always be like this. Don't worry. And we have lots more shenanigans to get up to the next time I come over!” she tickled him.

* * *

In her apartment, Elise began drawing and painting. She bought a large sketchbook from Michaels' Craft Store along with watercolours, acrylics, and coloured pencils. She felt surges of joy rip through her heart, and she didn't question it. Life was different now. She had been blessed. She worked carefully and diligently all night sometimes, on her artwork, and slowly, even more mysteries began to appear. In her attic one night, at her desk, working on a painting of a pink-patterned seashell with laughing faces around it in the wind, she felt and saw the presence of an angel.

At first it was a ray of white light, coming through no window. She started and said, “Hello?” It felt like there was someone there.

The white light grew into the body of a person, but taller. Much taller. She sensed that there was more than one person, that there was a whole choir full of them, very nearby but not in this universe. She could hear them singing. The angels were singing lost hymns. Hymns humanity used to know when they were all perfect and living in the Garden of Eden. And the angel, the one in focus, before her, told her his name. It was a symbol. Not something you could translate in human language. But she felt it burned onto her brain and knew she would never forget it. The angel stood there a long time. The choir continued to sing. Elise felt herself start to float, out of her body and into the air above. A tingling sensation came over her astral body, like fine metal.

* * *

Everything in Elise's life had transformed. She was happy, she was kind, and she knew in some way she possessed genius. She had been given the ability to create art, and music, spontaneously and easily from her imagination. She was spinning by herself around in her apartment when she accidentally got too close to the stairs.

Elise felt herself falling. She felt her world of hope and beauty falling away. Her feet slid down the hard wood. She crashed her head at the bottom of the staircase on the uncarpeted floor.

It was back to pain again. Her vision spread out like ripples. This time she remained conscious. The pain was intense but she managed to breathe. It was fine, she was ok. She didn't need to go to the hospital. But somehow everything felt...not right. Not right at all. And she looked around her apartment at the bland brown walls and the boring tiled floor.

That night, Elise tried to work on her painting but she couldn't do it. She tried to come up with more songs in her head. She was scratching at the surface of nothing at all. She called to the angels, called out to God. The apartment felt very still. Her gifts had gone. Along with the joy she became used to possessing. Elise waited as time went on, for what she had before to return. She kept postponing any more dates for her babysitting job. She couldn't stand to see the heartbroken looks on the children's' faces, when they saw she was just normal Elise again. She tried to sing, as she had once been able to, but her voice felt small and weak, and like it was missing the most fundamental element -that force of fire that was within her.

Five long, fitful years passed away. Elise was spending the summer at her aunt and uncle's cottage in Michigan, a long ways from the bustling city where she'd been before. She'd been unable to keep a job once she quit babysitting, unable to get out of bed on some mornings and she had dropped her friends, one by one. She wasn't eating properly, and she had lost weight but not in the good way. Her aunt and uncle were out at a corporate meeting filled with software people. Elise sat on her bed. The house was quiet. She dug her nails into the side of her arm, and scraped. Why was she so stupid? She flicked on the TV, changing channels at a rapid pace, never settling on anything. She felt the part of her that was missing. She felt it acutely. She had never gotten over the loss, for magic, once you taste it even for a moment, changes a person so fundamentally that they can't exist without it in the way that felt normal once. Like true love, and this had been a form of true love, that one glorious spring when God had been with her in every moment. When she had glowed with divine glory, the wonderful energy coursing off her in ripples everyone around her could feel. Her mother had asked, “What happened? I was getting used to the new Elise,” as if the old Elise didn't measure up. She felt embarrassed and humiliated whenever she had to interact with someone in public, no longer bearing that fierce smile, that light from the inside, instead being withdrawn, wanting to curl up inside herself.

Elise decided on a whim to take her aunt and uncle's boat out. Her aunt and uncle had showed concern as she'd barely said anything at dinners, been unable to concentrate on the mystery novels that stacked the hallways, which used to be her favourite, and barely smiled, spending the time sitting in front of her computer but really staring into space. She'd overheard them talking in the kitchen. Maybe it was depression. Maybe it was time to encourage her to seek professional help.

She drove the boat out past the islands which clustered closely together like giant turtles who were all related to one another, and onto the part of the lake that stretched wide out into the open. She kept going, speeding and bumping over waves that were now coming out of nowhere. The wind picked up. The sky that was a healing, vivid blue only a few minutes ago was dampening, turning grey like a bruise. It was now or never.

Elise stood up and took all her clothes off, pretending to be the gifted, spiritually sensitive saint of a person she was before. She imagined she was Venus, in that painting, being born out of sea foam, created for the first time, her eyes sparkling, her skin radiant and her hair blowing like a mermaid's. She felt the cold wind on her skin. It was romantic. As romantic a scene as any to end her life. She dove in. The water was murky green around her. It would be a few minutes of pure torture at most, staying underwater, forcing her head down and down and down. The water was frigid. It was September and yet this felt like ice. Words of hatred bubbled up under her skin. You could be absolutely anyone. You have no special talents. Nothing to offer the world. Then something caught her off guard. There was a vague shift in the temperature of the water. It wasn't shockingly cold anymore. It was warm. She saw, ahead of her, a great light. It was yellow like a sun. She swam towards it. She could hear singing that wasn't the sound of angels in chorus. This was something more primal, more animalistic, like a chant with words she didn't know. It was one voice. An older woman's. And in that deep, low soliloquy with words of an ancient language passing over her head, she glimpsed the thriving, bending tails of mermaids, within that light. And she felt herself swim up to the surface. A gasp broke as her face open as she touched the air.

* * *

Elise said to herself God saved her that day. Late that afternoon she was sitting in her bathrobe in the guest bedroom, her hair dripping wet. Her worried aunt and uncle stood nearby and tried not to ask too many questions. They offered her tea, and put gentle music on. Her aunt lit candles to make the atmosphere more warm. “We'll let you rest. You've had a hard day. You can come and get us if you need anything,” said her aunt. “We are family and we care so much for you.”

A long sigh of gratitude possessed Elise as she lay awake that night. She felt like kissing the ground. Everything felt solid. The world would keep on going, she knew. It was a blessing to be a part of it. In that moment, God had reached in. He had interfered, and showed her the miraculous side of life once again, for a moment. And in that moment her decision had shifted. The magic, the beauty, was still out there, even if she couldn't see it. She felt a certainty, and along with it a gravity, that she wouldn't return to the emotional heights of what she had once been gifted with. But she thought back to Jane and Michael. If one of them had been suffering, she would have wanted, simply, to relieve it. For them to be ok was enough for her. They didn't have to be gifted or brilliant, although they both undoubtedly were, in their own ways. Elise remembered the surges of happiness she used to feel. They were signs of her soul ascending, her as a person transforming into something heightened, something beyond. She didn't have that anymore. But she looked out the window at the forces in the night, the pine trees blowing and shaking in the wind and the cool sliver of a moon. Nature was barren, as well as blossoming and vibrant. That was a side of life. She had glimpsed both worlds.