You know when you have some weird experience that, although absolutely real and relatively mundane, defies explanation and can not be replicated as well as having gone undocumented?
You can tell people about it later, but never prove it? Never share the experience?
It’s a weird kind of loneliness and the older I get the more I resent it, because those memories will die with their keeper.
So what the hell, let’s share, yeah?
This isn’t really extremely mundane, but it is a piece of personal headcanon that I really can’t tell people about until I’m sure that they aren’t just gonna write me off as a wacko.
So one time I took a ride in my friend’s 1971 VW microbus. Since it was my first time in the van, he was telling me about it, about the previous owner Earl who had died and left it to his kids, about how the kids could never get it to run properly but because of that he was able to buy it for a song. He told me about how Earl’s kids swore that dad’s ghost had haunted the van after he died, because it was his baby and he never let them drive it. Also while on that ride, we got pulled over (allegedly for not changing lanes for a cop who had pulled somebody ELSE over, but really because it was a neon green VW Bus with rainbow hubcaps and Grateful Dead bears dancing in the windows and we were in rural Illinois, a very corn-fed conservative area) and handcuffed and searched (we obviously did have drugs on us) and left stranded on the side of the road for over an hour in February while they tried to decide if it was worth doing the paperwork of arresting six people for a pipe and a gram of weed. In the end, the driver got a DWI and a paraphernalia charge, but I got something a little stranger.
The next day, I woke up with a beet-red handprint on my forearm that didn’t go away for several hours. And, try as I might, I couldn’t quite get my other hand to grip my arm in the same way without seriously tweaking my wrist in a way that definitely would have woken me up if I’d done it in my sleep. But after that, I seemed to have borderline-supernatural good luck in minor events. I’d get pulled over (again, with a car full of drugs) only to be warned that my headlight was out. I’d blast through yellow lights just before they turned red. My acid was never bunk, my shrooms were always powerful and benevolent, I’d never wait for trains, bands that never went on tour would play special events in my city right after I first heard them. Little things that nonetheless gave me an incredible quality of living in my early to mid 20s. I was still broke, I still couldn’t get laid to save my life, but I was having such a good time that it didn’t matter.
And then one day, years later, I was in the depths of extreme nicotine withdrawal (don’t vape, kids) and I rolled a “cigarette” out of random crap from my spice cabinet, including sage. It didn’t help. It just made my tongue go numb and my legs wobbly.
Now, I’m not really one for the supernatural. At the time, I was a pretty obnoxious Reddit atheist. I didn’t believe in an afterlife, I didn’t really believe in ghosts or spirits at all. But two months after that, I jumped headfirst into an abusive relationship that would completely alter the trajectory of the following decade. I think Earl’s ghost liked the cut of my drug rug after that first trip in the VW and decided to hitch a ride with me and help me out whenever a light touch was needed. And when I smoked that cigarette, the sage made him fuck off, and thus robbed me of his wise old hippie voice in my ear saying things like “this dude is literally violating the Geneva Convention at you, you should probably break up with him”
You have an interesting life