Illimitable

It started pretty small.

Little things, like I’d have a thought. Let’s say, ice cream. I’d think about ice cream on my way to work in the morning. Innocuous enough, no? Yet I’d walk into the break room at lunch and lo! Free ice cream was being doled out by a rather uncharacteristically jolly boss, apparently doing his best impression of a cartoon chef. (He was wearing kitchen gloves that matched the yellow of his plaid shirt, which stretched precariously over his protruding belly.) Or how about a scarf. The weather was unseasonably cold one February morning, and I thought, gosh, I could really use a scarf. That day a friend came over with an extra one she’d cleverly procured with a buy-one-get-one deal. Fortuitous! And then there was my favorite, the toilet brush. The toilet brush head broke off in the toilet one Saturday (causing me to swear loudly and spend the next few moments in utter wonder: was this even possible?), and the next day, sneakily hidden behind a stack of suspiciously aged potatoes, I found a shiny new one in my basement, completely wrapped in plastic. I have no recollection of every buying said brush.

Mostly, I chalked it up to lucky guesses. Coincidences. An abnormally tedious life suddenly becomes somewhat less so. Maybe the Norse god Loki thought I needed some intrigue. Or maybe the universe just wanted to mess with me. Frankly, both were equally likely. I certainly never thought I had been inexplicably, and rather ill-advisedly, been given the gift of extrasensory perception. Yet, one day, I did something extraordinary.

I started to entertain the notion that there was a connection between myself and these inscrutable happenings.

All right, universe, I thought. I’ll play this game. So I bought a little black notebook. Nothing remarkable, just a little leather notebook, plain black, not even lined on the inside (how unextraordinary!), and I started my thought experiment. I decided the best place to begin was to write down a thought I had, no matter how unintriguing it seemed, and wait. At first, there were several instances of absolutely nothing occurring. Ha! I thought, somewhat victorious, for whatever reason. I can’t make things happen! But then, here and there, some of them started to manifest. A lighter for my candle in the nightstand (I do not smoke). An extra can of cat food in the pantry (my cat eats way too much).

I dared experiment further. Perhaps it wasn’t just me for whom I could make things transpire. I began to write little gifts for my friends as well. I wrote chips for the party, when I saw the supplies getting low and bags appeared out of nowhere. Aha, but what if I was even vaguer! Higher credit card limit, I wrote before a shopping outing, with no regard for which card, how much, or even which friend. Downright careless! That did not seem to matter. “You won’t believe what happened to me when I checked my balance this morning,” my friend hissed as she grabbed my arm in the parking lot. “I’m definitely buying those cute pink bowls today!”

I carried my black book everywhere. It became a pleasurable challenge to me, finding something that I couldn’t make happen. How crazy could I get? What infinite realm of possibility did I have at my fingertips? Money was an obvious answer. A new car for my younger sister? My rent paid for the next year? All of them, done, and in such a subtle and mysterious way. My sister’s work decided she needed a company car. My landlord waived my rent because his aunt died and left him a large amount of inheritance and he was feeling a kind of generous grief. Hmm. Fascinating. Perhaps I couldn’t control nature. A red tailed hawk landing on my window sill? Bunnies that follow me through the yard? A flirtatious deer in the stream! I felt like Snow White, each creature enchanted with my glowing presence.

Now, to be fair, I am no monster. While the idea of writing, make a bird poop on someone’s head did occur to me, I thought, but would that even bring me satisfaction? Indeed, it would not. The truth is that the joy I felt in each small wish fulfilled spurred me on. And more than that, I could feel in my gut that the book wouldn’t have done anything crass. I would never have admitted it, but the book and I were bound somehow. Inherently I knew what limits I could push. But here’s the thing, reader. Knowing what’s going to happen is not exciting. Having that kind of power is, surprisingly, eventually less than satisfying.

So one day, I decided to be brave. I got out my book. A surprise, I wrote.

Admittedly, I was quite nervous. I hadn’t specified a good surprise, mind you, and who knows how this crazy book works? As the sun wore it’s weary pattern across the sky, I began to sincerely fret about the most unlikely and unhappy scenarios only. What if I came home to the cold, dead corpse of my cat? What if my elderly father tripped and fell down some stairs? What if I died? What if my mother died? I can’t believe I wrote a surprise in my book! How could I have been so careless as to leave something like this up to fate??

It turned out to be a telephone call. I’d won $20,000 from a contest I’d entered months prior, in the before time. My relief overtook me as I sunk my back down the wall into a fetal position. I can’t take this anymore, I thought. I have to tell someone.

“Someone” turned out to be my oldest friend from college. She listened in silence, her medium brown eyes and pointed eyebrows peaking over the rim of her moss-colored coffee cup. Perhaps I expected her to laugh. Perhaps I thought she would dismiss my foolishness as the insane ravings of a childish girl. What I did not expect was for her to look right into my eyes and say, “So what you’re saying is, you’ve discovered you are the godhead, only you’re pretending you’re not.”

An admonished child, I began to stammer something about the book. “No,” she vehemently interrupted, “Not the book. You.” She was right, after all. This had begun before the book; it began with me thinking and the world around me changing to meet my thoughts. Had I forgotten this? Or perhaps I chose not to remember. It’s easier to meet one’s inexplicable fate when it comes from outside of you. I knew what she was asking; what fear strangled my heart? The book was a mere corrupted talisman. Could I meet this greatness head on?

“Take the money,” I murmured, suffocating under the thought of my endless potential. “I don’t want it.”

“No.” She leaned forward in her chair, her bright eyes boring holes into me, her voice so low I strained to hear. “What are you going to do about it?”