The first time I saw something . . .

…that wasn’t there.

I was living in a tiny white house with my mom and dad and sister. My sister and I slept in the same bedroom. I have to give you a bit of background so that this story makes sense.

My sister is severely mentally handicapped with a very rare syndrome called Patau’s Syndrome, however she is fortunate enough to have survived well into adulthood and is remarkably cute. I love her, but she could be a pain in the ass to grow up with. I think that was because she was the older sister, and she liked to power trip on me. Plus she was jealous of me for most of my early childhood, until she decided I wasn’t such a bad little person after all.

Anyway, we had bunkbeds, and I was on the top bunk. I had to sleep in the very middle and lay like a stick, because late at night small hands would creep up and try to pinch me. If I moved to one side of the bed, so would the hands. Pinching like little lobster fingers, ow, cut it out! We would also get locked in at night, because otherwise my sister would escape and go run out into the neighborhood.

And sometimes she pooped the bed. But she wasn’t content with just pooping the bed, she had to smoosh it all over our stuff and the walls and oh gosh it was just a mess.

So most of my early memories are of waking up to the smell of shit. Shit stinks!

Anyway, one shitty saturday morning I was banging on the door trying to wake my parents up to let me out of the room. I was probably three years old or so, my sister was about six. They weren’t waking up and I was getting upset and crying, because I didn’t want to be in such a stinky shitty room. I banged and I banged and wailed. And then the strangest thing happened.

The door was white, and wooden. And this image came up. It was as clear as if there was a film being projected onto our bedroom door. I was so stunned I stopped crying and banging. It was an aerial shot of the parking lot of the Buy Low Furniture Store downtown. The cars parking were late seventies models (this would have been about 1981 when it happened, so it makes sense). That was it. Cars parking at the Buy Low Furniture Store.

What did it mean? Not much of anything really. It was just this image, thrown out there to make me stop crying. And I was flabbergasted. I’d had a vision. And as far as I could tell, it didn’t mean anything.

Then my father opened the door and the image vanished, and I looked up at him and he had sleep in his eyes and I never saw anything like that again.

The Buy Low Furniture store was later torn down. My parents split up. And eventually, after a couple of decades my sister stopped smearing shit.

And I got a room of my own.