Disclaimer: I’m bringing this over from the “Post Ghosties” thread at the CH -- I’m just too ding-dang distracted by clack to write a new entry right now! For those of you who haven’t seen it...well, I’d say “enjoy,” but I’m not sure that’s appropriate...

In college, I dated a wonderful guy (believe it or not!), a tall curly-haired Iowan named Brian. Talented, upbeat, positive -- a tad confused about his sexual preference, but hey, at my college (theatre arts conservatory) you had to take what you could get! He was a very positive and supportive influence on me in many different ways, but the longer I knew him, the more he seemed to veer toward being gay. Which was fine (I just wanted him to be happy), but his behavior got more and more outrageous and he began picking up all kinds of little social diseases (this was just before AIDS arrived on the scene). My last encounter with him was a bitter one -- I informed him that IMO it wasn't normal to be spending two days a week sitting in a VD clinic and he'd better stop experimenting ("pick a flavor and stick to it!" is what I believe I said). He accused me of being a puritanical prude and that's pretty much where we left it. At that age, I probably was a little bit self-righteous, but so was he. Let's face it -- we were both immature.

Flash forward about 8 years. I'm in a restaurant in Chicago and am thrilled to run into Tom, a long-lost mutual college friend of Brian's and mine. We start talking and I ask him if he's heard anything about Brian. He stares at me and says, "So...you still don't know?" I ask him what he means. "Brian died of AIDS about 3 years ago," he tells me. "He didn't want you to know -- he thought you'd say 'I told you so.' But I thought someone would have let you know by now." Well. Needless to say I was pretty upset -- felt guilty and sad. I would never have held it against him, of course, but still...not even a chance to patch things up or say goodbye, not to mention what he must have gone through in those early years of AIDS. And I was angry with him for writing me off. It became a big unresolved issue with me.

Flash forward another 2 or 3 years. I'm in a musical that features a seance and we just aren't getting it. The director arranges for the cast to go to a real one, by just plucking a business card off a bulletin board and calling a number. On the way there in the car, another actress asks me, laughing, if I'm going to try to contact anyone on "the other side." I say, "Yeah, I want to know what's up with my college boyfriend Brian and ask him if he's still mad at me." We laugh.

We arrive. There are two women -- one is the "medium" through whom the dead person speaks and the other is sort of an interpreter telling you what's going on. The evening passes largely without incident as they go through everybody one by one and come up with mostly nothing -- "Your kitty misses you in Heaven" and "Your mom is looking out for you" kind of stuff.

Then they get to me. The medium's head turns sharply in my direction and she creepily locks eyes with me. The temperture in the room gets very cold. I have the nauseating feeling that she's got a string attached to my solar plexis and she's pulling something out of me. The interpreter excitedly says, "Ahh...so you're the one! Somebody's been trying to get through ever since this appointment was made -- his name is Brian. Are you Julia?" I swing around to look at my actress friend but she just gapes back at me, dead white, shaking her head. The medium stands up and I swear, starts taking on his physicality and his way of talking. She is short and heavy; he was tall and thin, but she starts to look like him. He used to be one of those people who is constantly stretching; she started doing that. She/He paced back and forth (as he often restlessly did), berating me. "You shouldn't have worried about me. I'm okay -- great, as a matter of fact. You're the one I'm worried about -- you're afraid to live! Get out there and do it!" (Something he often said to me.) When I picked myself up off the floor, I was able to ask a few questions. "What are we doing here?" She/He answered, "We're put on earth to teach a lesson and to learn one. When we finish doing that, we die." Whatever that means. "Is there someone watching out for us?" "Yes," he said -- "we all have a guide. It's when we don't listen that we get into trouble." Hmmm. I don't remember a lot else, but I still wanted proof that it was him, so near the end I asked, "Where's the little boy?" [The last time I saw him, we were walking by a shop window in Chicago and saw two wooden pins -- one was a little boy and the other was a little girl. I bought the girl and he bought the boy.] She/He stared at me in disbelief, threw back his/her head, laughed contemptously in just his way and answered, "In my mom's jewelry box, I guess!" And then he vanished from her face and body. She flopped into a chair, exhausted.

Everybody just sat there in shock -- you could feel the electricity in the room and there was no doubt in anybody's mind that something really strange had taken place. There was no way they could have found out any of this beforehand -- none of us had ever been there or met these two women before. Afterwards, they came up to me in some awe and told me that I was apparently really susceptible to psychic energy and that if I wanted to learn to meditate I could probably communicate with the dead directly.

Never did it...Lord knows I've got enough distractions with the living!