Sliding Doors

And other things we can't explain

This post is going out to all of my subscribers, both paying and casual! I wanted to let you know that I’ve started an extra weekly newletter under the Dear Clementine banner. It’s called Death Becomes Her, and it’s specifically dedicated to exploring the Tarot and the role it can play in knowing ourselves better and enhancing our creativity. And yes, this is even for the cynics and skeptics among you! I don’t use the Tarot to predict the future or look out for strangers, whether they be tall, dark, handsome or otherwise. But as a 78 card deck covering archetypes and circumstances, the Tarot is a wonderful tool for writers and documenters of the human experience. You can see a preview of DBH’s first post on my homepage - and for the next 48 hours, I’m going to make the whole thing public so you get an idea of what I’ll be doing with it!

In the meantime, this is an excerpt that was originally in that post but that I realised needed space of its own to breathe. It’s a story about something unexplainably esoteric that happened to me when I was sixteen, but it’s also a story about teenage girls, intense emotional longing and the unsettling knowledge of what might have been had I not listened to whatever it was guiding me that night.

***

Have you ever seen a ghost? I haven’t, or at least I don’t think I have. I’ve seen things out of the corner of my eye, shadows that dart away when I turn to look at them. I’ve captured strange blobs on photographs before, orbs that could look like a face when you squint at them. Once, I heard (or perhaps felt is a better word) an unseen presence speak to me at a festival. They wanted me to speak to a woman flicking through CDs in the tent I was working in, and so I made my way over to ask if she needed help. She was friendly and sweet, but I felt a deep sadness radiating from her. As we spoke, a knowledge dropped into my heart so unshakeable I would have bet money on it - that she was in grief, having recently suffered a profound loss. Her husband or her father, I thought to myself. She asked about the tattoo on my forearm and I told her I’d had it done as a tribute to my mother, who’d died a year or so earlier.

Oh! she replied. I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo for that same reason.

She told me that her beloved father had died recently (I knew it!) and she was distressed because she hadn’t been able to cry. She felt trapped in the grief, stoic and bordered up against releasing the emotion she feared would break her.

Listen, I said to her. I’m doing a show tonight with a friend, and I’d love for you to come. It’s about losing a loved one, and it’s sad and funny and musical and cathartic. I’ll put you on the door.

She said she would think about it. I knew not to push, so I said goodbye and wished her well either way.

But she did come in the end, approaching me afterwards to tell me how much she’d gotten from the experience. The tears that had been trapped inside had found their way out, and she’d spent the night sobbing and laughing. I feel like something has been dislodged in me, she said.

On a whim, I asked her about something someone had said to me the night before. My co-performer had invited a friend who she claimed was psychic, connected to spirits and ghosts and everything that had always fascinated me. Naturally, I asked her if she’d seen my mother or had any kind of special message from her for me. Not as such, she replied. All I could see when I looked at you was a field of blazing sunflowers.

As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t make the image fit. My mother had loved roses, tending to them in her garden even in the days leading up to her death. Sunflowers held no resonance for me whatsoever, so I filed her words away in my internal SKEPTIC folder.

But with this grief stricken woman standing before me, I asked her if sunflowers meant anything to her. She told me her friend had sent her a packet of sunflower seeds with a condolence card after her father had died, but that she hadn’t been able to face planting them yet.

Listen, I said. I don’t want to freak you out or overstep. But I have to tell you that I felt very strongly pushed to speak to you today, by a presence I couldn’t see but that I knew somehow was male and important to you.

I told her about the psychic who’d seen me with the field of blazing sunflowers, and said that I believed I was being used as a conduit to pass on a message to her - that her father was okay, and that wanted her to be okay too. She cried, good tears this time. A few months later, she wrote me a letter with a pair of earrings as a gift. I’ve planted the sunflowers, she told me, and affirmed how much that night had meant to her.

Perhaps your own SKEPTIC radar is going off now, and that’s okay. There are charlatans galore out there looking to exploit grieving folks. I know, because I’ve met them in my grief. I don’t know how to explain that day except to say that I knew the thing that I couldn’t see was standing to my right, and the words I couldn’t hear were being broadcast into my brain. I also know that there are things we have no explanation for, but that the not knowing doesn’t make them any less true or real. Like how we can meet someone and feel an instant simpatico with them, as if we’ve known them forever. Or how we can dream something only to have it happen in real life. Is there such a thing as a muse, the sprite responsible for delivering otherworldly bits of magic into the hands, voices, minds of artists? And what of those moments when our gut screams at us with every fibre of its being to not get in that car, to not walk down that street, to not speak to that person?

There are things we can’t explain. Here’s another one of them.

***

When I was sixteen, I almost died.

A school friend of mine had invited a small gaggle of girls to stay with her family at their beach house, and the collision between hormones, power plays and the toxic cloud of too much Impulse body spray formed its own kind of potent magic. It didn’t take long for three of us to splinter off and establish our own exclusive little trio, laughing too loudly at jokes we kept off limits to the others and disappearing into the kitchen to choreograph dances we made sure there were only three parts to. We were Em, Gem and Clem, and the rhyming of our names was recited like an offering to the Goddess of Teenage Girls. We were working the kind of dark magic that feels so thrilling at that age. The powerful you shall not pass magic that, whether you believe in it or not, we’ve all felt it work on us at one point or another. It’s that invisible wall whispered into being by someone (or someones) determined to keep us out. It stings when you’re its victim, but gosh does it intoxicate when you’re not.

On this one night in particular, our gregariousness grew too big for even the house to hold. The three of us decided to walk to a nearby phone booth. And when I say the three of us, I really mean that Em decided because she was our leader. Our Supreme. Sometimes you just know these things without needing to be told, which is another way that magic works on us all.

Unlike Gem and I, Em had a boyfriend. This fact alone was one of the many reasons we turned to her to lead our little coven, delighting in the vicarious feeling of worldliness that such a thing delivered. He was older, a shaggy haired boy on the brink of manhood with a drivers license and a panel van. Later, we’d realise these are the kind of sorcerer’s tools that rarely translate to power for teenage girls but what you don’t know when you know everything could fill a library’s worth of books.

Em wanted to call him to “check in”, and Gem and I decided it was imperative that we also phone our parent/s to do the same. This being the analogue days of the mid nineties, we traipsed off down the road along the cliff top to the nearby phone booth, laughing and mucking around like a trio of high pitched clowns in low slung jeans. It had grown dark already, but with the three of us together I felt every bit as invincible as the deep, inky ocean that snarled and thrashed along the rocks below.

As we neared the phone booth, we saw that we weren’t alone on the cliff that night. A man - a real one this time, not a half boy, half man hybrid feeling his way into adulthood with a younger girl to both ground him and excuse him - was bent under the bonnet of his car, illuminated by the glow of the street light above him. The back of the car pointed towards the phone booth, and I could see a P-plate propped in the rear window. It was the kind of detail I always noticed then. Desperate to hurry adulthood along, I’d headed straight to the local police station on the day of my sixteenth birthday to take the test for my Learner’s permit. When I failed on the first sitting and was told I’d have to wait a week to try again, I cried like a wounded beast in my bedroom. When I successfully passed the second time, I clutched my temporary permit to my chest like an amulet and then impatiently checked the mail every day for the glossy card with the yellow trim that announced me to the world as a LEARNER DRIVER. At the age of exactly sixteen and a half, I could take the test that would elevate me to PROVISIONAL status and grant me entry into the club of drivers we all agreed at the time were the most interesting group on the road - teenagers, once just like us but now encased in a shimmer of mystery, with far flung places to be and the means with which to get there.

But when I saw the P-plate glinting in the artificial light of this particular scene, it struck me as incongruous alongside the man’s obvious adult age. P-plates made teenagers cool and adults losers, because the only kind of adult I knew who’d be on their Ps was someone who’d waited years to get their license in the first place (and therefore had nowhere of particular importance to be) or who’d been legally demoted to P-plate status because they’d been caught drink-driving. Given the half empty bottle of beer resting on the roof of the man’s car, I assumed it was the latter.

To understand this next part, you have to channel not just the intensity of teenage girls but the depth of desire that can exist among us. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the assumption that deep friendship and even love documented between women is necessarily always queer (at least in the sense that we understand that word today), because this simplifies the expanse of feeling that lies beyond sex and physicality. I’ve had sexual crushes on girls and women, the nature of which has been very obvious to me. But I’ve had crushes too that are less easy to identify the boundaries of, that have nothing to do with me wanting to touch a woman’s body and everything to do with wanting to inhabit her landscape. To live under the glow of her sun, to be blessed by her attention, to be her chosen confidante, elevated above all others. This was how I felt about Em, and I suspect the same was also true for Gem. Which is to say, as much as we might have operated as a trio that week, Gem and I were very much the base of the triangle gazing up at our North Star.

And so when Gem, still high on the laughter that had fuelled us all the way along the clifftop, jokingly said she should squeeze into the phone booth next to me while I placed a collect call to my parents, I should have said yes. In any other scenario, I almost certainly would have - because the snake of jealousy that coiled in my gut whenever she made Em laugh or was singled out for her attention would have told me that leaving them alone together was dangerous. Don’t turn your back for a second, it might has hissed at me. They’ll close the door on you and leave you behind.

But something had shifted in the air around me. Whether a premonition or just instinct, I felt a sudden rush of NO surge through my body. It was as if I were standing outside of time, connecting to a source with wisdom far beyond the inexperience of my youth or even the limitations of the earthly plane. There were no words spoken, no whispers carried over the wind, no ghostly spirit standing before me shaking their head. Just the immediate and unshakeable knowledge that I mustn’t allow anyone else to step inside that phone booth with me.

Do you believe time is malleable? Is everything really happening everywhere, all at once? I wonder. When I think back on that night now, it’s almost as if a future version of myself shot up from the hull of my existence to steer the ship through a treacherous passage. If not, maybe the alternative is true; that we really do have unseen energies and spirits waiting for the time they’re needed to push us out harm’s way.

Whatever - or whoever - might be responsible for the instinct that flooded me that night, the fact that I listened to it saved my life.

Better not, I told Gem, stepping into the phone booth. You wait out here.

I left her and Em standing near the car, giggling away. The feeling of unease had magnified in the small space, growing to an electric kind of buzz as the operator asked where I wanted her to connect the call to. I remember her saying how much she liked my name, but I was too distracted to respond properly. Why is she taking so long? I thought to myself, although it can’t have been more than twenty or thirty seconds that had passed since I’d picked up the receiver.

I had that sense again of time being fractured, breaking itself down into single units around me that made it easier to see three steps ahead. Because of that, I felt the inevitability of the crash before I’d even heard the car start, which made the conversation I was having with the Telstra operator feel even more bizarre.

FUCK, I suddenly screamed, just as the car’s engine began to rev loudly outside, its wheels catching against the handbrake. I dropped the phone and reached for the door, but it wouldn’t open. I had no choice but to press myself into the back corner of the booth, wedging myself between the pane of glass on the left and the wall mounted phone. Just as I did, I heard the brake release. I watched as the car hurtled backwards into the phone box, smashing through the door before spinning sideways to take out the whole right side of the glass. Undoubtedly freaked out by what he’d done, the driver sped off up the street without so much as a glance backwards.

Miraculously, I had sustained no physical injuries whatsoever. I was surrounded by broken glass, but not even that had managed to hit me. The sense that time existed as a linear thing whooshed back into place. Hyperventilating, I climbed out of the gaping hole that had been torn through the side of the booth and then collapsed into hysterical laughter. I could have died! I’d tell the girls back at the house after I’d calmed down, puffed up and preening from an adventure in which I’d glimpsed my own mortality.

But then, so could have Gem. Whatever kind of magical energy I was visited by that night, it saved both of our lives. There had been less than a foot’s worth of space between my body and the rear bumper - nowhere near enough to clear the breadth of either of our bodies had we lollygagged our way into that phone box, squashing ourselves against its glass windows and each other. The car would have smashed directly into Gem, who most likely would have then been pushed forward into me. We could have been pinned between hot metal and broken glass, or thrust backwards through the glass and bisected in some nightmarish image belonging to a horror movie. I know, because I’ve seen it happen over and over again in my mind’s eye.

And how to explain the door? I’m sure there’s a technical explanation. But the vastly more compelling one to me is that, had I managed to open the door that night, I would have stepped directly into the path of an out of control vehicle - and whatever was trying to save my life had to work some last minute spiritual locksmithery to make sure they succeeded.

Quoting Shakespeare, my mother used to say There are more things on Heaven and Earth than can be dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio. Meaning, we don’t know shit about shit. And so I try to keep an open mind about the things I cannot see, knowing how little I’ve been able to explain some of the things I have.

Does it matter if other people don’t believe? Not to me. Do we need an explanation for everything? Well, where’s the fun in that.

Me, I like to think of all the possibilities. Who knows what lies beyond this world and our own limited senses within it? Not me.

But I like to imagine. And sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I see something there, imagining me right back.

Blessed be.

***

If you like this kind of thing and are interested in exploring more of the esoteric and the wondrous, unexplainable things, sign up to my newsletter Death Becomes Her! It’s a celebration of the Tarot, creativity and all the unknowable things that captivate our attention.