I was born on October 11th, 1984, sometime in the midafternoon. According to my parents, He-man and the masters of the universe were playing on the television. I was born with the umbilical wrapped around my neck. I also had to have immediate hernia surgery.
While I can't reveal my name, I can tell you that just like my father, I was named after a person in the bible. This person was willing to give up his birthright to another. It was my father's original plan to have two sons. The elder wanted to be a person who would be willing to give up everything to help others in need, so he named me after that person as he did the same thing in the bible. My middle name came from the minister that baptized my father. When put together, my first and middle names form a rather interesting sentence that I will refrain from putting now, but I may bring it up later.
We initially attended a church on the East Coast that will not be named but will eventually become a significant addition to this story. My mother would later comment that if it weren't for that church, perhaps things would have turned out differently. My parents would lay me down in a crib in the church's basement while they attended services, being watched over by one of the older ladies. This act is what my mother would claim was the cornerstone of everything to come, but I've always disagreed with her; these things were going to come to pass whether I was in that crib.
It's weird; I have this memory that cannot be a memory of that place. I am two or three years old and in a room with many kids my age. My cousin attended as well, but he was in a different room as he was four years older than me. The room is full of kids, and they are all playing, but two activities would be irresponsible for kids. I remember a wooden block filled with crooked nails that the other kids and I were hammering into the block, with an actual hammer and a saw used to cut another block of wood in half. The saw had a brace around it so that you couldn't remove the saw from the block. As I said, this can't be real; how could any adult be so irresponsible as to allow kids to play with these things? We would leave the church around when I turned two or three and join my grandparents at another church.
I was born different from everyone else. I was given something that some people might call a gift; others might think it is a curse. For me, it's always been somewhere in between. I was born with the ability to see demons and dark spirits around me. I have no recollection of the first instance and can only go by what my parents told me. Initially, we lived in my grandmother's house, my mother's mother, and many evenings, I would look out the window of my grandmother's house and suddenly say, "They're back, Mom." My mother would ask who was back. "The Smoopies, they are back." I don't know what the Smoopies were or what that word even meant; chalk it up to the strained vocabulary of a two- to three-year-old.
It's rather curious that I can't remember the Smoopies; I can vividly remember my mother getting into a car accident around that time. I remember being pulled over the side of the road with a police officer pulling up to the scene. I was so tired that I walked over to the back of the police officer's car and fell asleep. When I woke up, I was back at my grandmother's house, lying down on the couch. I had initially thought it had all been a dream until I had to go with my parents to get a new car that night. I remember many of the details of that event but nothing about the Smoopies.
Of course, you could just say that this was all the imagination of a two-to-three-year-old boy suffering from nightmares about the things around him that he did not fully understand yet. That is a plausible thought process; any rational person would come to that conclusion. That is until the events that would happen in the home that we moved into after leaving my grandmother's house.
We moved into my childhood home when I was about four years old. My soon-to-be elementary school was only a few blocks away from my house. The guy who owned the house before was an eccentric man; he had a panic button alarm at the top floor of the house that my father would have to disable because I would always press it and send the alarm off. We would later find out that the electricity was done poorly, and it was a miracle that the house didn't burn down from faulty wiring.
When we moved in, my mother would catch me saying, "Stop it," out of the blue one day. My mother would ask, "Who are you talking to?" I would reply, "That girl, she won't stop making fun of me." My mother would tell me later in life that when she heard this, she told my father that she wanted to move out of the house, but my father would look at her and tell her that we couldn't because they didn't have the money and that it was just a figment of his imagination.
I initially slept on a mattress in my parent's room, transferring to my own room a few weeks later. I remember having a dream in my parents' room. I was outside in the back alley of my house. The moon was half-crescent, and the dream was black and white. I was running from something in the alleyway. I couldn't figure out what I was running from, but I knew that if I let it catch me, I would be hurt or worse.
When I transferred from my parent's room to my room, I refused to have my light turned off at night. "Don't do it," I said, pleading with my mom, "Don't turn off the light, or it will get me." My mother would have to stay with me until I fell asleep. Then, she would leave the room. My fear of the dark wouldn't just be at bedtime; our only bathroom in the house was on the second floor, in a hallway that was always dark. Whenever I finished using the bathroom, I would burst out the door at full speed and rush downstairs as fast as I possibly could, trying to get away from the darkness and what lay inside. My father would say I was running from old Scratch, another name for the devil. My father would be joking about this, but he may have been more correct than he realized.
There was a time when I was in the house's basement. I was there because that was where my parents had set up the family room and television. I was watching a movie in a rocking chair when something in my head told me to look to my left. I saw one of my toys rise off the ground and throw itself against the opposite wall. This caused me to run up the stairs away from the phenomenon. My parents would move the family room upstairs after that.
I went to my doctor's office for a routine hospital visit. My typical doctor wasn't there, so I had to see someone else. During the visit, the doctor asked my parents to leave the room. When they did, the doctor asked me if my parents were abusing me. I had no idea what the doctor was talking about, so she explained that I had weird bruises on my arms and legs, and she believed that my parents had been hurting me. I told her that my parents had never hurt me and that they loved me very much. I think my usual primary doctor later would conference her and tell her that there was no way that my parents would ever hurt me, and he was correct. But it is still odd that someone would look at my bruises and think I would be abused. It made me think that maybe I had been abused by whatever was in my house, and I had no recollection of it. I would even talk to my father years later, and he would say, "Well, back then, we all used to play hard, so that was probably the cause of all the bruises." But bruises that would cause a doctor to think my parents abused me?
Things continued this way for some time, throughout kindergarten. But when I got to first grade, something changed, but not for the better.
Comments