I showed up to Ethan’s mom house to find Lauren sitting on the front porch waiting for me.
“Lauren… how are you?” I asked with genuine concern.
“I’m fine. I honestly have no idea how this all spiraled so out of control.” She shook her head. “I took a brief girls trip and by the time I came back Ethan was,” she held up her hands as if to say she had no idea. “He was in jail! Like, how?”
“He said he stabbed you. What happened between you two?” I asked.
She looked shocked. “Stabbed me!? He gave me a hug goodbye and said he was going to have his own boys night and made some corny joke about Jack Daniels being the other guy. He didn’t hurt me, not at all.”
“I don’t know how to tell you this but, there was blood in your house.” I tried to spare her the detail of just how much blood.
“I know. It was there when I got home so I called Ethan’s cellphone and his mom picked up and told me everything. I hired cleaners but I’m staying here for a while.”
We talked for a short while longer. She told me how she and Ethan had no problems, he had no history of mental illness or blackouts, and she has no idea why he would say that he stabbed her.
Sadly it would still be weeks before we ever got the blood results back. But for now, we have no victim… dead or alive.
Ethan could have slaughtered a pig for all we know. But for now, we had enough to get him out of jail.
He came over to his mom’s house once he was released and after a long embrace with Lauren, I headed to the front porch to talk with Ethan once more.
“Ethan, what happened man?”
He bent over and rested his hair in his palms. “I wish I knew.”
He repeated to me the same story he told me earlier. He thought someone broke into his house to kill him and it kept jumping between Lauren’s face to someone, or something, else.
We won’t know for a few weeks, or perhaps months, whose blood was in that house. And even then, if the DNA isn’t in our system then it will remain unknown. There’s no crime for holding a knife in your own house though, right?
I don’t know what the hell went on that night but Ethan only had one final thing to say to me. Gathering his thoughts he said, “Just take a look at your essay. It’s stuck with me all these years.”
So I walked out to my truck, grabbed my essay, and we sat together watching the rain roll in on the chilled January night.
It happens to everyone, just in different ways. Some of us will simply experience deja vu as we eat our morning cereal while others will experience life-changing phenomena, but we all will experience an echo at some point or another.
In 1842, Julius Robert Mayer discovered the Law of Preservation of Energy. More simply put- energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
E=mc^2
Albert Einstein discovered that mass and energy are interchangeable. This means that everything- including humans- are energy stored in mass particle form. Therefore, humans may neither be created nor destroyed. So where does our energy go when our hearts stop pumping red fuel throughout our veins?
It’s simple really, we become a higher existence of energy. Much like a potato has the ability to light a bulb, in the right environment, we have the ability to light a room as well.
Echoes are generally harmless as they are simply residual energy. I say generally, because at times, there can be a glitch. Think about your grandmother’s favorite lamp. It has hand painted flowers wrapped around a glass base. You have to find classic incandescent bulbs since it won’t even work with fluorescent. When you reach for the cord it’s a creamy eggshell color, although at one time it was white. As you turn the dial to click on, you have to stop at precisely the right click or else it shuts right back off if you flip it too far.
Sure, this lamp is well loved and beautiful no doubt, but it only survives and lasts under the most precise conditions. The right bulb, the right flick of a switch. But one day, even as you do everything right, the bulb blows a fuse and poof- it’s broken.
Sometimes our world has a glitch. Maybe we didn’t use the right bulb that day or we neglected to turn the switch just right. That’s when you can hear the voice whispering softly into your ear that something is wrong and you need to follow your true path.
My mom had a friend who almost went to college but instead she became a hair dresser. Everyone gave her such a hard time but all she could say was that she did what she knew she was meant to do. Sure, people thought she was a hippy or took an easy way out, but when she became a six figure hair dressed with the perfect husband and kids meanwhile their other friend went to college only to wind up divorced and an alcoholic- who’s to say we can’t hear our own paths?
There is another type of glitch, though. One more sinister. Sometimes we listen just perfectly and we do everything exactly to plan, but a fuse is still blown. Maybe there was a leak in the electric box out of our control, or a storm came through. These glitches are unpredictable and can manifest echoes.
Unexplained phenomena such as UFOs, Moms magically lifting cars, or even perfectly sane people committing murder, are a result of this life as we know it counteracting a glitch in the parallel. It’s when deja vu hits the hardest.
But sometimes our déjà vu moments can be echos. Echos of history, echos of energy, or even echos of vibration. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, so where does it go? It’s in a loop. And sometimes, those loops crinkle like a garden hose.
I’ve seen it happen, you know. Well, not yet, but I know I will one day. And I’ll use this essay to prove it.