Texas 1964

The taste of sweat filled my mouth as I placed the paper onto my tongue. A familiar tingle crawled from there to the corners of my jaw; only a matter of minutes now until it starts. I take Robin by the arm, my brother who's already starting to experience the change in reality that's soon to take me, and we start for the barn. The 800 feet or so between the back porch of our old rancher, and the double door entrance to the rundown red barnhouse, stretched forward in front of me as if every step we took closer only forced it further away. This simple walk turned into an absolute journey as the stars danced across the deep blue and black of the night sky, pulling my eyes up and away from the ocean of grass, whose waves flowed back and forth with the gentle breathing of the wind.

Suddenly I realized that I could no longer feel the grip of Robin's hand, and the night was no longer heavy with the commonplace heat and moisture of an Austin July. Rather, a cool crisp air was gliding across my body. My world was altered, in that I was above it, some 20 or 30 feet, my view from off the limb of a tall oak. Though, to my surprise as I typically cower from high places, for some reason completely outside of my comprehension, I was not afraid. I glanced around my new world, with a sharpness in my vision I had never experienced before. Noting the light, bent at the peripheral edges of my sight, while the center was clear as crystal. Sensing our seperation I called for Robin by name. But a startling screech was produced from my effort. Again I called for Robin, and yet another screech tore through the night. Immediately followed a rustle of leaves and snapping twigs beneath me which filled my heart with a moment of mortal terror, my eyes darted to the source, where stood a young girl, not yet a teenager.

She was staring up at me, with moonlit, bright emerald eyes not unlike my own, looking just as shocked as myself. She lifted up her hand, pointing directly at me as if to prove that she could really see me. Her mouth opens and I recognize the shape of the word ‘owl’, but the sound that erupts from it is like the groaning of metal from a failing bridge. This noise so sudden and horrific it rips me from my brief dimensional slip, and the first thing I’m aware of in my reemergence to familiarity is the vice like grip of Robin’s hand on my arm. I lean back against the barns creaking support beam, holding onto the safety of his presence.

That experience followed me for the rest of my life. Though in the moment I awoke afraid, startled by the strange and unfamiliar sound that the girl made, I’ve come to feel that it wasn’t her intention to frighten me. Maybe I couldn’t understand her sound, because I wasn’t meant to. Throughout my life, the best way that I could justify it was for a brief moment, I was a passenger in that bird’s life. Looking through its eyes like that of a camera, but somehow tied to its soul; as I could feel its environment, and experience its fear. Decades later the answer came to me in a way so profound that it couldn’t be mistaken for any kind of accident. In the year of ‘94, I rushed from work to the hospital bedside of my soon to be wife, having just overcome the ferocious battle of childbirth. When, with a warm motherly smile, she passed our child over to me. I took the baby in my arms, and for the first time her eyes opened, and stared up at me. Familiar, bright emerald green eyes not unlike my own, with her arm outstretched pointing to my face, as if to prove that she could really see me.