Writing My Own Story

I felt stiff and bound, and not in the way Dorian Gray would describe as pleasurable. I tried to move, but my existence felt flat and concrete. After a few moments of trying to move, an ephemeral feeling passed through me that I was simply just a book. What an odd thought.

Several moments passed before a god-like figure appeared before me.

“Hello Annabelle,” it said in that deep, omnipotent voice often mistaken for Morgan Freeman.

“What is going…” I tried to speak, but felt as though my words were only penmanship on a piece of paper. 

“In your past life, you wouldn’t listen to me. You wouldn’t read the bible, much less listen to your teachers, thus I have sentenced you to life as a book before I can check you into heaven,” the figure said. “You have to teach people with your words instead of your actions.”

Well, shit. This is what I get for dying with outstanding library fines on my tab?

“Your first assignment will not be your last, but the more you can cast your words to help others, the closer you will come to heaven,” He said as he dissolved into the bright light above me. I felt like I was in an airplane because I could see the clouds out the window to my left, floating through the heaven I was trying to trespass into.

I didn’t have to feel it, because it was true. The passenger in front of me was a young woman that was too busy to read because she was zonked out on Xanax. Evident from me being in the pocket of the seatback in front of her, she had procured multiple avenues of distractions to ease her flight anxiety.

I too decided to take a nap while I wondered what God had written on my pages. When I awoke, the girl was gone, and the plane was empty. Like all the men in my previous human life, I had been abandoned.

As the clouds grew into city lights and the window pane only shone black, I dozed off again. When I awoke, a smaller, mousey girl sat in front of me. Giddy about the plane taking off, she exclaimed to her partner that there was a book in the seatback pocket that someone must have left. I rolled my nonexistent eyes at her naivety. 

Yeah, great. I get to be your leftovers. If I could sigh with despair, I would, but instead when she picked me up I felt my hardback bound spine reverberate her emotions. She was scared but putting on a brave face. She was pregnant, but her boyfriend didn’t know. She was glowing. She was happy. She was frightened, but she was opportunistic. How I felt about these things, I didn’t know, but suddenly I was out of my body (err, pages?) and I was back in a living room with my boyfriend’s father, telling him I was pregnant on prom night. In the past, that memory had made me shudder with horror of his impending scorn, but now I wanted so badly for this girl on the plane to feel no fear in her pregnancy.

I traveled back from the memory that felt so real to the airplane. The girl had tears in her eyes. Apparently my memories of my life appeared on the pages for humans to read. She looked at her boyfriend and said, “I’ve been terrified to tell you because we aren’t married and your mother is Catholic, but I’m pregnant.”

A look of pure adoration and celebration shone through the boyfriend’s eyes. “I can't wait to have a little version of us, and don’t mind my mother – I’ll deal with her this weekend during our visit.”

Color restored in the girl’s face and I saw clouds that were gray from worry fly away from her aura.

Is this what god meant? Was I somehow writing about traumas from my past to help heal others from their current despair?

This theory was answered when the airplane girl accidentally ditched me with her pregnancy brain in a bathroom in Boston. I had ditched a guy in a bathroom in Vegas once, but wondered why God made this happen here, now, and on St. Patrick’s day, of all days. 

A new girl waddled in, clearly inebriated, and grabbed both sides of the stall to puke with reckless abandon into the toilet. Grateful that I didn’t have a sense of smell, I knew the girl had taken one too many Irish car bomb shots. 

“Fuck my life,” she said as she spun around and sat on the toilet seat. I think she even broke it, but I wasn’t one to judge as in my human life I had broken many toilets while drunk. 

She was beautiful. So fresh and anew with hope, I saw a weird golden glow above her head. Was this one of God’s angels that had gotten off course? Wondering if divine intervention was here to remind me that it wasn’t just my empathy that was to be discovered in my reincarnation, I thought about my powers. 

Thankfully, the girl placed her hand on my cover and I was able to ascertain her inner desires much like Lucifer can on that stupid TV show I used to watch. "What are your desires?" he would ask and then the person spoke the truth even if they normally lied or hid their deepest desire.

With her touch I was immediately transported to a memory of hers where she was taking care of her little brother and trying to get him to school, applying to university, and juggling her own addictions. 

Hoping it would help, I rewrote the pages of my history that I had previously evangelized into the truth of raising a young sibling while battling alcoholism. She happened to open to the pages I wrote in my head (err, spine, body, mind?) and started to cry. She called her dad and said she needed help raising her brother. 

While these were minute, simple moments in life, I realized how many times I didn’t listen to the stories of God, the Church and my public school teachers that were trying to teach me the ways. Having that experience, God knew my story was one to be written, but that I couldn’t find peace until I accepted my words as my own truth. I was my own unconventional teacher.