I’m a psychic.
My aunt saw the ability and trained me when I was younger. My parents thought I was crazy but my aunt knew what ran in the family.
She taught me that most people have a box inside them where they keep their most precious memory. She taught me how to dig it out.
Surrounding myself with the most pleasant memories that every person had was one of the only ways I could keep myself sane while walking around in the crush of the general populace. I rarely left the house.
My aunt was called Trushka. We were descended from Eastern Europe. Not very many records existed of our nomadic family. We had been gypsies for generations. The circuses that had travelled Europe for centuries always had a Seer. A Reader. A Medium. A Bridge. One of our family.
Always a girl (except for Panthos in 1410 but that’s a tragic tale unto itself) and in this generation, it was me. Except this was Ohio and America was dead inside.
My parents had turned their back on the old ways. They were investment bankers on the property ladder. Ghosts, curses, changelings, fairies, mind-reading; all these were fairy tales from a primitive culture.
They were going to have me committed. They had tears in their eyes. They were happy to let my aunt take me in as a last-ditch effort. That effort turned into a permanent situation. I lost touch with them.
I lived with Trushka until her death twelve years later. By that time, I’d matured into a 24-year old young woman. Reclusive but gifted with the strong figure of my hard-working lineage. I was tall and shy.
When my aunt died, I needed to pay rent on the house she’d left to me. I got a job in the library.
Like I said, I’d been taught to cloak myself in people’s nicest and most cherished memories to keep myself sane during working hours around people.
It was always the same. Wedding. Wedding. Wedding. Honeymoon. Honeymoon. Honeymoon. Wedding. Wedding. Honeymoon. Second date. That one glorious moment from a current or past relationship, glittering on a string deep in the chasm of everyone’s heart.
Most of the time.
I remember the first time I got a picture of a room of dead people. Blood splashed on the walls. A sense of euphoria and honest love. Two little girls and a woman. A man tied up in the corner that had been forced to watch but was now dead as well.
I saw him. Over there in the cooking section. The man with the glasses. Impossible to tell how long ago this memory was from but it was his happy place.
It happens rarely but when it does, I don’t know what to do about it.
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