I have a tale to tell, all things in this tale are true, I exaggerate not at all. It is a tale of mundane magic, prophecies on a small scale. Deja vu. 

We have all lived and many of us have experienced that phenomenon called deja vu. A weird remembering of a moment that has just happened. I have heard though never confirmed that this is our brain filing short term memories into the long term memory storage space. Giving you the weird sensations of remembering the moment from a long time off. This explanation makes sense to me, though I confess I know nothing of the brain. It describes most of my experiences with deja vu yet it fails in several areas. 

The first time. I remembered exactly the first time I had an odd sort of deja vu. I had a dream. The kind of dream you have when asleep. I was in the kitchen washing dishes with that cartoon version of Hercules. My grandad was conversing with me. Some months later this scenario happened, though Hercules was absent the strange feeling of deja vu came over me. I thought it was odd, but did not give it much consideration, I was around 10 years old at the time. Time passed, life moved on

The second time: I would experience strange moments of deja vu, I believe most of them were that process of filing memories in the wrong memory slot. However there was a second occurrence that was not easily explainable. I was in art school. Frequently I would stay late and paint till the dark hours of the night. Burning the midnight oil and listening to audio books. I was running dry on good book and so decided to give Stephen king a try. I knew he had a reputation for horror so I decided not to commit myself too deeply to a novel. Instead I started a collection of short stories by him. If I was repulsed by it I could stop fairly easily without wanting to know how it ended, ( a motivation which has caused me to read way too much trash.) The first story was about a little boy who meets the devil, a man clothed in black who does nothing but say nasty things then unhinges his jaw and trys to eat the kid, weird, not too scary, not too disturbing. On to the next one! The next story begins, it is midnight and I am leaving the painting studio making my way home. The story describes a middle aged woman, she is on vacation with her husband. She is tired, bored, dissatisfied, she keeps remembering things thinking the thoughts of an older woman on vacation with her older spouse. They get off the plane and drive towards wherever they are going and her husband’s face melts off and she is in agony, reset. She wakes up on the plane next to her husband believing he had a dream, rinse and repeat. As the story progresses you find out that she gave herself an abortion early in their marriage and is now in hell, repeating the same moment over and over again always ending with her face melting off. As the story drew to its close I had a flash of deja vu. An insight as to what I would see around the next bend in the country road. A saw two men standing over a prone figure laying in the grass. I drove past, rounded another bend then stopped. What was that I asked myself, I had known what I would see, and had seen it. Should I go help? I turned my car around and drove back, seeing nothing. 

This is easily explained as a hallucination, I knew what I would see and so saw it. It was dark, the book, and over active imagination paired with a story of deja vu and an experience of that phenomenon. 

The third time: These other examples of Deja vu fit nicely into the explanation. Yet this third type does not. Not a dream but a waking dream struck me one day as I prayed in the shower. It was not a picture but a memory. A knowing, a thought from the future and surrounding that thought all the vague half knowings that our minds possess without thought. A knowing of where you are without thinking about it. A knowing of who is near and who is far. A knowing of how you feel. All these vague thoughts and understandings flashed through my mind in an instant, yet the thought that burned at the core of the flash was an understanding that I was in deep trouble and trapped in addiction. After this flash of insight occurred I stood in my shower slightly unnerved and then prayed that such a situation would never occur. The secondary insights from the “vision” were confusing. I was at a bible school, a place I had heard vaguely about but had no intention of attending. The addiction was one that I had kicked in the past, and hoped, at the time, never to be enslaved to again. Yet the vision came true two years later. I had forgotten it until I arrived in that moment. 

I started to notice these visions. More and more, they arrived when I was doing well emotionally, when I felt close to God, when I was atop the mountain. They were always visions of me at my worst, in the valley, suffering from depression, enslaved to sin, and I would always forget until I reached the bottom of the valley.  

This flash of Deja vu is slightly different from others I have had in the past. The main part is that I recognized it as it happened. This useless form of prophecy has haunted me. I am given the foresight of a destiny unchanged and unchangeable. What doom shall I be shown as time passes on. 

end note

so this is all true as stated above, though I make the end rather melodramatic. Why? because it’s fun. I like the idea of writing a short story about a man who sees doom his entire life not avoiding it but living through it.

The photo is a picture of one of my mugs named cracked. a visual representation of what you probably think of me.