#friendly reminder that she was a safe harbor and a source of kindness/reason and in no way shape or form deserved what happened

[septembersghost]

a few weeks ago, I was talking to @elliotschafer about S6 and the Braedens (and I would absolutely not have pulled this from the vault were it not for Polina wanting to read it), and the terrible sadness that underpins their story, and it unearthed the memory that basically one of the only pieces I ever wrote and willingly posted - that was actual story and wasn't reflection or fractured glimpses of narrative or poetry or meta specifically about Dean (as there are so many of those posts scattered all around the internet like petals) - was about them, ten years ago. (I was deeply upset by the memory erasing, which...remains.) anyway, I decided to dig it up out of its grave. the date on this was May 23, 2011, which is...wild. I didn't change a word, for better or worse, it’s exactly as it was in the document from a decade ago.

I was also apparently listening to "Trust Me" by The Fray (I entitled the journal entry "looking for something I've never seen"), if you really want a throwback mood, and MORE things the universe mocks and weaves together for me, because I pulled up the lyrics on Genius and it says: Release Date - September 13, 2005

of course it does. of course, what else could it possibly be? I hear you, fate, I know. (waving to my little self of 10 years ago, not sure if this song is about Dean anymore or if it's about me. it's probably both, it usually is.)

If I say who I know, it just goes to show You need me less than I need you Take it from me, we don't give sympathy You can trust me, trust nobody But I said you and me, we don't have honesty The things we don't wanna speak I'll try to get out, but I never will Traffic is perfectly still

We're only taking turns Holding this world It's how it's always been When you're older, you will understand And then again, maybe you don't And then again, maybe you won't

the thing is, the way I concluded this at the time, as I was fumbling around for some semblance of hope - because that's my brand, it's what I do - I forgot I ended it the way I did. it's likely not been read since I initially posted it, so I forgot...the way I left it. that I would have no idea the added poignancy it would have, all this time later. Dean just has a way of doing that, gleaming by accident, an ember that sparks into a flame and burns on, long after he’s walked over and out of the threshold.

(additionally tagging @someoneoffthestreet​, @laurelwinchester​, and @deandaydreams​, bc you are all with me in my deanlisa emotions hive, and I may as well embarrass myself thoroughly! no pressure to read it though, and of course anyone who wants to is welcome to. 🤍)

look at my icon from back then! I can’t believe this is still active:

(the note is from the original entry too)

Note: This is probably the only fic that will ever get posted here, so I'm not quite sure how to introduce it. Memories are an interesting concept - they make us who we are, they help us grow. They move us forward and hold us back. They fill us with fear and with hope. The idea of losing them is unsteady ground. Would we really want to erase events, even painful ones, just for peace of mind? Would we ever want to forget someone we loved? And what if the choice was entirely out of our hands? All of these things were haunting me following the S6 finale of SPN ("Let It Bleed" in particular), and Friday night, this grew out of that idea.

Fragments. Lisa wasn’t in the hospital for long. Her injuries hadn’t been serious. Lucky, the doctors said. A nurse picked up her chart, flipped through the pages, frowned. Mention of a stab wound casually jotted amongst the notation on minor soft tissue impacted by the accident. Obviously, someone had made a mistake. It wasn’t even enough to cause concern. The nurse handed her the forms, she signed them, and her son wheeled her out, through sterile white corridors, the smell of antiseptic and latex gloves burning her nose. Ben was uncharacteristically quiet. Something about the car accident had him shaken. She tried to reassure him. After all, they were fine. But a nearly imperceptible whisper in the back of her mind left her uneasy. It wasn’t anything she could define. It was that feeling you get when you’ve left a light on in an empty house – nagging, persistent. Unsettling. Certain details of the situation didn’t add up. For one, their car hadn’t been damaged. Hell, their car was still at home. In the garage. And they were miles away. Not far enough to cause real alarm, not past state lines, but far enough for it not to make sense. A friend from work had to pick them up in front of the hospital, and when they were asked how it happened, neither of them could answer. The man who had hit them disappeared into the night. No report was filed. If it wasn’t for the aching all over her body and the tenderness in her side, there would be no indication of an accident at all. Her friend told her gravely that Matt had died. It was unexpected, he had also suffered a freak accident. “How horrible,” Lisa said, but she wasn't acquainted with anyone named Matt. Her friend muttered something about shock or temporary amnesia, looked at her kindly, and the subject was dropped. When they got home, they found a living room window broken, along with a chair in Ben's room and other odds and ends. Nothing was missing, though. It didn’t even look like a break-in. It was strange, like everything else had been strange. She called a repair man, the window was fixed, and the house became as ordinary as it had ever been. When Ben nearly cut his foot on a shard of glass embedded in the rug, she practically destroyed that patch of floor, vacuuming it incessantly and digging at it with her fingernails, as if something else was buried there. When she realized this erratic behavior was scaring her son, she pulled herself together. What the hell was going on? She felt like her entire brain was bruised. Work had given her a couple of days off to recover, and she let Ben stay home from school with her. It felt like they both needed a little time, even though there was no clear medical necessity. She took hot baths. Ben played video games. She made spaghetti for dinner and he silently helped her clear the plates. He smiled at her and said an “I love you, Mom,” before she sent him off to bed. And when the time to recoup was over, their schedules settled back in, like clockwork. It was fine. It was normal. It was the life they’d always had, wasn’t it? A week later, she sat in front of the mirror in her room, brushing out her hair. It took twenty minutes before she realized she hadn’t stopped. There was absolutely nothing wrong. That was the problem. When she crawled into bed, she felt incredibly alone. She went to the closet and pulled out an extra pillow. She had no idea why it was even there, but she suddenly wanted it. It smelled like a mixture of Old Spice, whiskey, and strong soap. A hint of cinnamon, tang of ashes. It was a stranger’s smell. Yet she clung to it, the way she’d clung to her stuffed rabbit when she was a child. Something in her desperately wanted to cry, but she held it in. There was no explanation for tears. It was another two days before she found the shotgun. This detail filled her with an immediate sense of fear. Under no circumstances should there have been a shotgun in the damn closet. She’d never even been this close to a shotgun before. Had she? The sight of it was dreadful, but she didn’t quite know how to get rid of it. The solution was to hide the firearm in the back of the hall closet and forget it was there. And she did. She found Ben in his room, listening to his iPod. He pulled out the earbuds when she entered, and something led her to pick it up. He was listening to Zeppelin. What kid his age listened to classic rock? When she asked who had recommended it, he honestly responded that he didn’t know. Like the pillow, and the shotgun, she let it go. They were simply loose threads. That’s when the dreams started. They were nothing at first. A face in her crowded subconscious. When she started seeing it more clearly, the face began to stay with her. In her waking hours, she realized it was the man from the hospital. The guy who’d hit them. The one who’d disappeared. He was nothing to her. She’d barely had a fleeting glance from the hospital bed. But the face…the face wouldn’t leave her. It became a minor obsession. She called the hospital and requested the records, but there was no mention of him anywhere. The nurses had no recollection of a man even being there. She asked Ben if he could remember the man’s name, but he couldn’t. He only had one vivid memory of the man – "You take care of your mom." He hadn’t even come past the threshold of the door, but she remembered. She remembered the cadence of his voice. She remembered the way he smiled at her, intimately, with so much inexplicable sadness buried underneath. She remembered he looked like he hadn’t slept in a year. She remembered the exact shade of green in his eyes, and how they crinkled at the edges. She remembered the freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose. She remembered he was beautiful. Frankly, she started to wonder if she was losing her mind. She found a shirt buried in a drawer that smelled like the stranger pillow. She laid next to it and finally cried. She cried for hours. She cried until her eyes were raw and her breath was coming in short, stabbing gasps. She cried every single dream, every single flash of an image, every bit of that scent, every syllable of the voice, right out of her body. That was when she forgot altogether. It took another four months for her to find the shoebox. She was rummaging in the top of that same hall closet, the one harboring the fugitive shotgun, in search of an umbrella, in case she needed it the next morning. Rain was slamming against the window panes, the wind was causing tree branches to scrape the glass like phantom fingernails in the dark. A slam made her jump and her flying hand hit the lightbulb, smashing it against the wall. The remains tinkled to the floor softly. Frustrated, she got the dustpan, a stool, and a new bulb. Slivers of glass were swept carefully up and discarded. Standing on the stool, she replaced the broken bulb, and the light from the new one seemed too bright, almost harsh, like sunlight flooding a room that hasn’t been occupied for a long time. She blinked twice before stepping off her perch, and saw the box, tucked away on the top shelf. Something tugged at her memory, and she brought the box down with her. She carried it gingerly to the sofa, as if she was afraid it would explode. She stared at it, lightly tracing the design on the lid with her fingertips. It took her a couple of minutes to decide she was being ridiculous and lift the lid. The scent hit her immediately. The same scent. The pillow, the shirt. Her heart immediately began beating much too quickly. On top was a necklace, a simple charm on a silver chain, something that looked like it would be given in affection. There was a spare car key. The bottom rattled, and she found a few extra bullets. She removed one and held it in her palm, where it felt unnaturally cold. She shivered and dropped it back in its place. Nestled between these metal items, which seemed like symbols of both protection and danger, was an envelope. One of those cheap grocery store envelopes they used when they developed photographs. Gingerly, she pulled it out. She lingered at the flap. Mystery photographs didn’t seem like a good idea. But it was too late not to look. First, there were she and Ben, pulling faces at the camera. Then, one of her alone, sitting on the porch steps. Her own expression was foreign to her, something out of a life she'd never experienced. It made her afraid, and it hurt in a way that she didn’t understand. Then she got to the next picture, and there he was. The boyish grin, the green eyes, the freckles, all of it. The face that had abruptly stopped haunting her dreams was suddenly staring directly at her. The next picture was of the two of them. His arm was around her shoulders. There were pictures of he and Ben. There were pictures of Ben in his truck. This man that had never existed was suddenly all too real. The final photograph in the bunch was of the three of them, smiling, sitting close together, looking like…like a family. Looking complete. The kind of family she and Ben had never quite had. It didn’t make sense. There wasn’t a part of her that could logically comprehend any of this. But every fiber of her being told her it was right, every throb of her heart in her own ears told her what it meant. She took the photo and put it in a frame, and she put the frame on a table, in amongst class pictures of Ben and shots of she and her sister. If she knew anything, she knew it belonged there. She never remembered who he was, nor did Ben. There was no context, no name. Only fragments scattered around the house, cast adrift like little ghosts. They never discussed him. Not really. There wasn’t enough of anything tangible to discuss. There was no reason for the sense of comfort his face gave them. There was no reason, but he became an unspoken talisman, something to believe in. In the corners of their memories and the deepest parts of their souls, he was there. Somehow, he had existed. And he reminded them to live.

[voicesfromthelight]

What I Learned from A Botched, Haunted Field Trip, Long Ago

Today, in the interest of encouraging my readers to build their trust in Spirit as well as the power of intention, and to align themselves with the purest spiritual motivations even in times of uncertainty, I’d like to share a memory of something that happened to me when I was was in college, quite some time ago, when I was much less experienced. It’s a story that illustrates the importance of following your gut, not compromising your psychic integrity, of choosing your spiritual company wisely, and how the power of love is greater than that of fear. It’s also a great story about learning from your psychic blunders!

My late teens and early twenties were a time of strong, but mostly spontaneous psychic activation for me. At the time, I was most actively involved in the practice of energy healing, working together weekly with a healing circle that was led by a woman who became my de facto mentor - a Huna-trained shaman named Evelyn Wakeman, who was one of the most psychically gifted, powerful healers I had ever met - as well as with one of my closest friends, a young woman named Anneli. My psychic abilities were not yet mediumistic in the sense of communicating with the departed, and I wasn’t even sure that such communication was possible. However, for a period of a few years, I found it easy to observe people’s energy clairvoyantly, and also would experience very strong clairsentience in the form of feeling people’s physical and emotional sensations in my body while performing healing work on them. Once in a while, I would have a precognitive dream (usually, in lucid form), in which I would meet and speak to spirit guides, or experience other kinds of precognition, but all in all, I had no control over when, how or why these kinds of communications would take place. I was still feeling my way around the world of Spirit, looking for my place.

Anneli and I were soulmates. (We still are!) For a while, we were roommates. The amount of things we had in common was uncanny, and we were jokingly referred to as the the “Finn twins.” We were both Finnish on our mother’s side, and American on our father’s. We were both deeply connected to nature and pagan spirituality. We both had psychic proclivities, and had each spent a year  living in France, speaking the language fluently. We both loved music. At the time, we were inseparable.

During our senior year, Anneli became involved with the local punk scene in our college town. The ragtag bunch of rebels tended to have an energy that was quite different from what Anneli and I had in each other’s company: Where we were sensitive and introverted, they were exuberant and, at times, volatile. A lot of the kids came from much more challenging circumstances than either of us did, and some had already experienced much hardship in their young lives, from combat in Afghanistan, to alcoholism and drug addiction. However, their company provided a much-needed sense of freedom from what sometimes felt like an ivory tower, and I was happy to venture out once in a while with Anneli and her new friends.

One day, Anneli told me that she had met two new guys in the scene. We’ll call them John and Jim. John and Jim were into ghost-hunting, and would trek out together to allegedly haunted historical sites with a camera, hoping to capture evidence of ghostly activity, such as orb anomalies. They were soon planning on going to a cemetery dating back to the Revolutionary War, and Anneli was thinking of joining them together with her boyfriend.

I was intrigued. I had harbored a somewhat uneasy fascination with paranormal investigation for a while, but had never had any direct experience with it myself. If there was an authentic haunting going on at this site, what could have been more interesting as a psychic healer than to go and see how we might be able to balance out the energy there? Though I had never met them in person, yet, I never even considered the possibility that John and Jim’s intentions might have been anything less than reverent. I volunteered to join in on the excursion.

On the evening of the field trip, John and Jim showed up in John’s car, with Anneli and her boyfriend in tow, to pick me up from my apartment. As soon as my two new acquaintances sauntered into my house, their energy shocked me to attention. Jim immediately seized an accordion I had in my room and started to play it loudly and discordantly. Like two mohawk-headed peas in a pod, the boys were rambunctious, boisterous and unpredictable, but seemed friendly enough. I chalked up the instant unease I felt to a harmless difference in temperaments, asked Jim to put down my instrument, and followed the gang out into the car.

It was in the car that my unease began to descend into near-panic. The drive was long. I sat in the front with John, while Anneli, her boyfriend, and Jim, sat in the back. During a quiet moment, John and I started to converse about our interest in the paranormal. I remember him turning to me, his eyes squinting as he lowered his voice to a vaguely menacing snarl, and began to explain to me why he wanted to explore this particular cemetery. It was old, he said. Several people had committed suicide nearby, hanging themselves in the woods. And, he added, he believed it was haunted by demons. Demons, he explained, were once angels, who were thrown out of Heaven when the devil rebelled against the Creator. All of this was related with a kind of smug relish, without a hint of compassion or respect for any of the souls  associated with the site. It was all a horror story to him. 

I felt sick to my stomach. It was clear these two young men were only interested in projecting their darkest fears onto this experience, and my spiritual motivations for paranormal investigation had nothing to do with theirs. I also felt sad and terrified at what they were about to do, on a spiritual level - bringing that fear and darkness into a place of supposed rest. By the time we reached our destination, I decided I would not set foot out of the car. I wanted no part of any of it.

When we got to the cemetery, I had to explain to Anneli my reasons for not participating, as discreetly as I could. She sympathized with me, but decided that having come this far, she still wanted to go. As the rest of the gang walked into the pitch black night, I sat in the car, still terrified, and did the only thing that made sense to me. I prayed with all of my might. I asked to be protected by white light, and that none of the negative energy being brought to the place harm any of the spirits that were attached to it. I sat there for what must have been an hour, praying, and my fear never abated.

When they finally came back to the car, Anneli told me that John had said that he had “seen a demon with red eyes” in the cemetery. She herself had only felt an energy of forlorn regret permeating the site. I couldn’t wait to get home.

The following day, Anneli and I met up with Evelyn’s psychic healing group in the non-denominational chapel reserved for the meeting on our campus. I was unspeakably ashamed of myself. How could my spiritual judgment have been so poor that I had allowed myself to be put in a situation in which I was going to a haunted cemetery with people I had never met before? I felt like I had made a terrible mistake, and severely compromised myself. In fact, I was so mortified, I didn’t dare breathe a word of what had happened, or where we had been, to Evelyn, to whom I normally would have confided anything and everything. I felt like I had let her down.

A short while into the healing circle, it came to be my turn to receive energy healing from the group. Evelyn, leading the session, fell into her customary light trance. Then, after a few moments, she unexpectedly opened her eyes. She turned to me with a gentle smile, and said: “This is so strange. I’ve never seen this with you, before. Usually, I see spirit guides around you, but today, you have hundreds of dead souls attached to you. They are appearing to me upside down, which lets me know they were once human. They want you to help them cross over into the light. They know you have their best interest at heart.”

I burst out crying, and admitted everything that had happened, feeling an immense sense of gratitude, excitement and relief.  Here, despite the terror I had felt, despite the embarrassment at my lapse in judgment, the love and respect I had shown the souls in that supposedly dark place, through my prayers, had won out. The fact that Evelyn had picked up on what had happened, despite my silence, was proof enough for me that it was all true. We meditated together to cross over the souls that had followed me home from the cemetery.

Since then, I have always had faith that love will spiritually and energetically triumph over fear. Yes, I have had unsettling paranormal experiences since then, as well. However, also during those times, I have been sent specific, explicit messages from Spirit that my prayers have been answered, and that I will be safe. So, I invite everyone to remember this story when you find yourself in a situation that spooks you. Yes, it is always in our best interest to raise our vibration to an emotional frequency that is closer to love and further from fear, nor should we intentionally “dabble in darkness” if it can be avoided, but in a pinch, help is always to be found in the Spirit world and from Source if we just have the courage to ask for it - even if we ourselves are terrified. Trust in that!

P.S. This story is a great reminder, too, of how our expectations and emotional vibration affect what realm of the spirit world we resonate with! If you need a refresher on this topic, I encourage you revisit my piece on different frequencies in the spirit world.