After my strange experience with Marilyn I went home exhausted and quickly fell asleep. I awoke later that night and lay on my living room couch, the lamps off and only the lights from the distant office towers feebly illumining the room.
I saw her face shining before me—the face I always knew.
I didn’t have to understand every detail fully or comprehend it—it was greater than me. Everything was bathed in an aura like a familiar scent of something half-forgotten—like a name on the tip of the tongue.
Memories flickered inside my brain—a faint recollection reduced to a feeling, and that also dim.
But I savored each moment, drawing from the ether the elusive essence of her.
Nothing made sense, but nothing else mattered—only this moment, this timeless now.
The next day I woke late and didn’t have time to make breakfast, but got a coffee and a toasted cinnamon raisin bagel from the take-out window of the local Tim Horton’s coffee shop.
The drive into work was more hectic than usual—the temperature had fallen even lower and than the day before, and everyone was probably feeling unsettled—although few had more reason than I.
The mundane life I had been living for thirty years had suddenly changed one night in a dream and nothing had been the same since. It was akin to a spiritual awakening—in this case, the realization my psyche was now undeniably plural—there was two of me in there!
It all seemed strangely familiar as if it were a déjà vu—speaking of which, I realized I had forgotten something my current experience now prompted me to remember.
All though my life, if people forgot my name, they always called me Joe. I had forgotten about that until just now.
Also, there was that time when I was seven or eight—my mother took me shopping. We were passing a butcher shop and I stopped. I remember staring into the shop in disbelief.
“Where’s all the sawdust they put on the floor?” I asked my mother.
She looked at me blankly.
“And where’s the Three Little Pigs?”
An older man waiting for a streetcar laughed. “Those little statues haven’t been in that window since I was a boy.”
“What statues?” my mother asked.
“Why the Three Little Pigs, of course,” the older man replied.
My mother got this horrified look on her face and hurried me away. Whenever I tried to talk about it afterward, she’d always change the subject.
It was strange, I admit, but I always knew things—I knew for instance, that the old house on our corner was a converted Chinese Laundry and there used to be a small variety store directly across the street from it.
Whenever I remembered these things, a special feeling came over me—I felt numb and everything around me seemed to get brighter. Later, I convinced myself that these were products of my childish imagination—but now, I began to wonder if they were real.
Something was awakening inside me and Marilyn was the Muse who drew it out.
I didn’t understand how she and I were connected, but it was deep, profound and mystical.
It was such a deep soul tie that whenever I thought of her something deep within me began to cry—but it wasn’t sadness—it was tears of joy.