My young mother and my eight year old self sat side by side at a large table, buried in our very important work, on the screened in front porch of our home in North Minneapolis. Lilacs and Honeysuckle in the breeze. We painted with watercolors, made fabric headbands, glue gunning ribbons and lace to them, and attached gemstones to jean jackets. I made booklets with loose paper and a stapler, filled with drawings and descriptions of beautiful ladies I created in my imagination and couldn’t wait to grow up to be; glamorous, sex-pots covered in glitter. Among our materials were colorful bars of sculpting clay. I loved rolling the clay and smashing it into formations of tiny people and animals to live in my beloved, porcelain Christmas town. We added new buildings to it every year. A church (even though in real life, we never attended), a general store, opulent victorian homes. Every clay person had a backstory, that I’d write down in a notebook. Familial relations, what their jobs were, extramarital affairs. I had a flair for drama. It must have been summer or fall, as we were on the screened in front porch, and it was Minnesota. Interrupting our concentration was a loud bang, followed by a thud, during which my mother threw me to the ground, and jumped on top of me. She breathed heavily, hot and suffocating, and I could feel her heart pounding hard, pressed up against my bony back as she told me to “stay down”. We waited, flattened against the blue painted wooden floorboards. I didn’t know what we were waiting for and I didn’t know what the sound was. I only knew we were scared. After an eternal silence, there were sirens, and people, rushing out of homes, yelling. A neighborhood erupted in chaos. My mother told me again to stay on the ground as she crept towards the window screen in order to get a look outside. “What is it?” I asked, panicky. “Just wait. Do not look out the window. Stay down,” She said sounding stern, angry, and afraid. I was desperate to see. I felt trapped. Finally she stood, and I stood. Even though she was yelling for me to not look, I looked anyway, just in time to see a white sheet being thrown over a body, and a dark stain, nearly black, seeping through it and growing, like tentacles unfolding. There were people everywhere, standing all around, cops with yellow tape, and lights flashing blue and red. “Stay inside,” she commanded as she ran out the door and approached a policeman. Through the screen, I saw neighborhood kids, all rushing together in a herd, towards a parked police car. I pushed open the screen door and let it go, allowing it’s spring to snap shut, and slam behind me. Then I was running towards the police car, along with the rest of the pack. Handcuffed in the back of the cop car was a man spewing filth and spit from his ugly mouth. Brown teeth, haggard face, screaming a chain of words strung together like nothing I’d ever heard. All obscene. I stared at him, in horror, still unsure of what had happened, as the other children taunted him, sticking their tongues out, and wagging their backsides. Then, he looked right at me. Our eyes met and I felt an electric shock of fear, as he held my gaze. My first known encounter with evil. Nothing like this would ever happen in my Christmas town. They painted a white outline around the body. My mother wouldn’t let me watch. My dad was on tour, as usual. By Christmas time, the porcelain village was assembled, filled with little clay people, and surrounded by tiny plastic pine trees. I made an ice skating rink with tin foil and my father reluctantly allowed me to dump bags of minuscule, translucent, plastic snowflakes around the frozen pond and the little buildings. The fake snow seemed to get into every crevice of every part of our home, including our hair, food, and inside our underwear, my dad swearing and shouting, “I told you so…” whenever an errant flake was discovered. But it glistened when we’d turn off the lights in our house, and plug in the string of bulbs that warmly lit the porcelain structures from within. I prepared for Santa, writing a heartfelt letter in loopy cursive on homemade paper. Just outside the front door, the body outline was still there. The shape of a crumpled silhouette of a woman after being shot and pushed out of a van. I wondered if that little piece of pavement was haunted, and avoided stepping over it, or even going anywhere near it. Still, it beckoned me, piquing my curiosity, and I thought of the scary man in the back of the cop car often. I even wondered if he had put a curse on me. Friends and family came for dinner, and also stepped around it. We moved out of that house, not too long after. The outline remained. Onward and upward, to the greener pastures of the suburb of Golden Valley. Was this when it began? My obsession with death? Years later, I rode on a party bus from a Bar Mitzvah to the after party with forty or so other twelve and thirteen year olds. Next to me, was a boy with red hair. He was cute, and nice, and smiled at me often. Someone leaned over and whispered that he had a crush on me, so instantly, I turned mean, turning away, shutting him out. The sunroofs were open, and the kids started to jump up on the seats and pop their heads outside, like little groundhogs. I got up one time, nervously, and peeked out into the freezing wind on I-55, disliking the cold that blew my freshly curled and aqua-net sprayed hair, and gave me goosebumps on my skinny, lace covered arms. I sat back down, and thought of my father, always yelling at me to keep my hands and feet and head inside the car when we drove. He was so paranoid. Just then, I heard a loud crack, and the boy with the red hair collapsed next to me. The whole bus went silent. He wasn’t moving. I saw a trickle of blood on his forehead. We had driven under a low hanging bridge. He had died instantly. I wished I hadn’t turned my back on him, signaling my disgust in the rumor of his crush. I’d feigned aversion for a social game. Now, he would eternally think I was mean. Perhaps this is where the obsession began. Maybe the scary man in the back of the cop car did, in fact, put a curse on me. On a snowy night in 2003, I scraped the windshield of my Mazda, engine running, as I let it warm up in a parking lot in Minneapolis. As I was getting into the drivers seat, someone came up behind me, pushed me in the car, punched me in the face, sat on my legs and drove off. I begged for him to release me, offering him the car, my purse, and the cash that I’d just made waiting tables. He told me I was too pretty for him to let me go, and he was going to kill me. I couldn’t believe it. I had just turned twenty, and I was going to die. I sobbed while focusing on patterns that shifted on the beige carpet of the passenger seat floor, made by snowflakes falling around the streetlights, their yellow glow flooding through the windows as we sped by. I thought of a future I would never have. After seven hours, I escaped, but I had changed. My death curiosity turned into an infatuation. I almost couldn’t believe that I was alive, and if I was alive, it seemed I had switched into another dimension while trapped inside that car. Nobody around me seemed particularly glad that I had made it. Only frustrated by the nuisance it caused them, trying to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of such an incident. The world was colder, more uncaring than before. Nothing was as it had seemed. I remembered the scary man’s stare and believed I was cursed. Darkness spread like blood on a sheet, soaking all the way through, rotting me to the core. For years, I lived in total disregard for my life. Until the day I hit my head in 2018. The head injury that changed everything. It always comes back to that day. I wondered if I had died and returned, I felt so profoundly different. Or maybe I switched dimensions, yet again. This time, to a time-line where I have a clear perspective and a mission to create, rather than the previous one, where my urge was to destroy, destroy, destroy. Now I argue about the afterlife. With friends, on dates. I must sound insane. Many smart people don’t believe in it. They believe in science. They have no proof. My proof of it’s existence is in the YouTube videos, documentaries, and written accounts of Near Death Experiences that I’ve poured over for years, when I was longing to return to what, at the time, I considered home. My proof is in the apparitions I’ve communed with, the spirits who have sent me messages, the inexplicable things I’ve seen and heard that others seem unable to see and hear. Everywhere I go there seems to be a ghost. My proof is in the fact that I am alive. I believe that is a miracle. Miracles are occurrences with no explanation. Like spirits. The afterlife. Angels. Like Santa Claus, who I believed in for an embarrassingly long time, well into my troubled teens. Santa, optimism, glitter, magic. They’re inextricably linked. Coping mechanisms, maybe. But fuck it. Yes. I believe, I believe, I believe. Believing, in and of itself, is a miracle. I create the life I dream, just like I did for my porcelain, Christmas town. The other night, I took magic mushrooms with friends, and went to a queer dance party, downtown. I felt alive on the dance floor. I was reminded of my humanness while holding my bladder as long as I could, but finally, I had to leave the comfort of my friend bubble and make my way to the toilet. After relieving myself, hovered over a pee dribbled seat, I ended up at the sink. I couldn’t get the sensors that turn the water on to work. I gestured and wiggled in front of those damn sensors for far too long, until a cute boy in eyeliner and pigtails came up next to me, waved his hand, et viola, the water ran. “You must be a ghost,” he said, laughing. That is not a great thing to say to someone on shrooms, and I looked up at him with big eyes, waiting for him to make it better. He continued laughing in a way that made me think he must know something that I don’t. I spent the rest of the night wondering if I was dead. Wondering if I’ve been dead this whole time. Since the head injury? Since the car? Did I hit my head on the bridge, or get shot along with my neighbor? It scared me. I didn’t want to be dead. Not yet. And if this was the afterlife, was there an after-after life? The after-party was at Fred 62. One am pancakes, eggs, and bacon with a dear friend. Gaudy Christmas decorations blinked and twinkled all around. Laughing our heads off as we came down from the sparkly shroom cloud, he helped convince me that I am indeed alive. It was heaven. You're currently a free subscriber to Neon Cowgirl . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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