Regarding reincarnation, some people believe a soul can float in astral form for up to six months after death. The soul in question has six months to plan their next life. Six months to hang around limbo, or maybe that’s heaven. Six months to pick a body, to figure out who they’re going to be, and where they’ll reside. Six months to decide what lessons they’ll learn in this lifetime.
~~~
The day of my 28th birthday, I remember dreaming of a storm when I awoke abruptly to pounding thunder. The force was Aunt Marie, with a rumble that could rival that of the local sheriff – I would know.
I scrambled, still in my nightgown, a unicorn sleep mask pushed my hair in disarray atop my head, and I wobbled to the door.
A blob of bright colors appeared as soon as the gap sufficed.
Aunt Marie yelled in her typical tone, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY.”
Cringing through a yawn I mouthed, “We’re s’posed to go to lunch at 1.”
“It’s 2.”
“Oh…”
I scratched my head, still drunk, and thought, “So, this is 28.”
~~~
Things that come in 28:
- Days in a lunar cycle
- Shots in a bottle
- Grams in an ounce
- Tiles in a standard box of Dominoes
- A woman’s menstrual cycle
- Days in February
- Not one person in the 27 club
Followers of Numerology believe in a “Life Path Number.” The mathematical process of discovering this figure is unique: adding each digit separately for the day, the month, and the year, until one single number is reached. Those digits are then added. Addition continues until one single number is attained.
Sometimes the addition will achieve a double digit with the same numbers, (11,22,33 etc.). When this happens, the addition stops. Such numbers are considered “Master Numbers.” People with “Master Numbers” as their “Life Path Number” have an embedded longing in their souls to do something of great caliber in their lifetimes… but don’t we all?
I was due to be born on December 14. For once in my life, I was early.
I was born December 7, 1989 in Canton, Ohio, at exactly 11:00 a.m.
12 = 1 + 2 = 3
7 = 7
1989 = 1 + 9 + 8 + 9 = 27 / 2 + 7 = 9
3 + 7 + 9 = 19
1 + 9 = 10
1 + 0 = 1
Life Path Number: 1
~~~
For as far back as I can remember, I’ve dreamt about one location repeatedly. Void of other people I arrive alone, feeling lost. The cold hallway tiles stick to my feet as I wander down the long corridors looking for something I cannot remember. Always, there’s something I need to find. Not unlike a dormitory, the white-walled rooms are lined with vacant hospital beds or student desks. Sometimes the rooms are deserted of remnants entirely, as though this old stone building has been left unloved on some lowly countryside for anyone to explore.
When I traverse the grounds, it feels like a farm, with its high grasses that scratch against my knees, and even higher, gloomier skies. The stones mirror the foreboding clouds and the bars on the windows seem to be made of the same concrete as the parking lot, though I’ve never seen a car. The slate-gray spires atop the towers match the wrought iron gate that surrounds the premises.
I’ve often wondered through the years, why someone would design a building to look so full of sorrow. It resonates with sadness and I awake with the same feeling of unbearable dread. One night, I slipped atop a curved staircase on the east wing. I tumbled down and before I hit the bottom, I remember thinking, “Someone must’ve pushed me.”
I sat directly up in bed. My clock read 6:00 a.m. Words echoed in the front of my mind that were not my own: “Search the internet for insane asylums.”
I trudged to my computer screen where I keyed the inquiry as advised. The fourth photo that appeared on my image search was the same building I’ve dreamt of for years. Located in North Wales, this building is called “The Denbigh Asylum.” It served as a school for some time, a mental institution for longer. Presently, it’s abandoned.
Why have I been dreaming of this place?
My dad booked Ernest Hemingway’s house as a stop on his cruise to Cuba. Maybe my interest in reincarnation sparked intrigue in his Baptist heart. Maybe he stopped for me.
I was wearing a Penn State sweatshirt, my parent’s alma mater, when he passed me relics from his trip. I could nearly hear the Nittany lion on the table in Hemingway’s study roar from the postcard: We Are – Hemingway and I, that is.
Serendipitously, I had found “The Old Man and the Sea,” a week after I wailed to the universe for closure. When my best friend, Heather died, her family held a private funeral. She was cremated, without a tombstone, and I was left grappling with the idea that my best friend was still out there in the world.
Then, I found “The Old Man and the Sea.” This book Heather had hallucinated on a bad mushroom trip years before. She said the old man came off the television set and told her she had cancer in her arms and was going to die. Seven years later, she did.
I never knew Hemingway wrote the book, but when I saw the spine glittering on a table at a used sale, the air around me pulsed. I knew I had to read it.
The novel unexpectedly paralleled our friendship. From a boy forbidden to venture the ocean with the old man, to a heroin addiction disguised as a marlin, Hemingway’s story concludes with the old man finding peace, almost too coincidentally. Also, the copy I bought was 127 pages long – what Mom calls our “angel numbers.”
In the postcards my dad gave me, the tops of Hemingway’s bookshelves are adorned with fishing memorabilia: rocks, sticks, and boating gear. His shelves are more elegant than mine: white and pristine, but the spines of our books share the same worn, disheveled appearance. The tops of my shelves and mantles, my altars, are decorated with knick-knacks. Things that remind me of Heather or Hemingway. From the postcard, I can’t read the spines, but it makes me wonder if any of the stories he has, are now mine.
~~~
Ernest Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois, at 8:00 a.m.
7 = 7
21 = 2 + 1 = 3
1899 = 1 + 8 + 9 + 9 = 27/ 2 + 7 = 9
3 + 7 + 9 = 19
1 + 9 = 10
1 + 0 = 1
Life Path Number: 1
“Hemingway wasn’t a good man, you know?” my dad asked me.
He was speaking softly, as though not to bring this notion to the rest of the family’s attention. Maybe I was just high. I was scooping mashed potatoes onto my dinner plate, the Xanax my mom had given me kept me a nice distance from my body. I remember watching the potatoes slide from the spoon, ploooooppp.
Dad continued, “Hemingway… he was really a pig among the ladies, you know?”
I did.
“He was married four times. He was rambunctious. Racist. A drunk… A mean-spirited drunk, too… Hemingway really wasn’t all that nice of a person.”
“Well, he killed himself in the end. So, he must’ve known.” I mumbled curtly, grabbing extra napkins.
My dad wore the same look of incredulousness as the time he saw my first tattoo. It’d been about a decade since I had wandered into the kitchen for munchies, forgetting my slippers. When he saw my nickname branded across the top of my foot, “Boots.”
Each syllable snapped like a whip as he asked, “But how did you do it?”
“Dad, I’m 18. I can legally walk into a tattoo parlor. I can legally be tattooed.”
Eleven years later, I turned towards the same refrigerator, “Beer in here?”
I think we were both thinking, “Doesn’t she ever learn?”
Later that night, remembering what my dad had said over the potatoes, “He really was a pig among the ladies… Hemingway really wasn’t a nice person…”
That was the first time I thought, “Maybe I wasn’t in love with Hemingway in a past life… Maybe I was Hemingway…”
~~~
Pete de Freitas was the drummer of the 80’s psychedelic punk-rock group from the UK, “Echo & the Bunnymen.” Pete replaced the “echo machine” as the band’s first drummer. He had an affinity for ecstasy, forsaking the band for three months to explore psychedelics in New Orleans, until he partied himself broke.
I found a black and white photo of him online. His hair playfully ruffles his forehead while a smile teeters on the side of his face. On one hand he wears a baseball glove, poised to catch, and in the other, he holds a cigarette. He was one of nine siblings.
Pete was born exactly one month to the day Hemingway put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
~~~
Pete de Freitas: August 2, 1962 born in Port of Spain, Trinidad.
8 = 8
2 = 2
1962 = 1 + 9 + 6 + 2 = 1 + 8 = 9
8 + 2 + 9 = 19
1 + 9 = 10
1 + 0 = 1
Life Path Number: 1
I refused to carry a white lighter the entire year I was 27. It’s bad luck for artists. No cultural phenomenon here, I made it to 28. I wasted that year, nonetheless, devoting each day to celebrating my birthday. I celebrated every day my accomplishment of absolutely nothing.
Famous members of the 27 Club:
- Kurt Cobain
- Janis Joplin
- Jimi Hendrix
- Jim Morrison
- Amy Winehouse
- “Pigpen” of the Grateful Dead
- Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones
- Pete de Freitas
Exactly six months before the day I was due to be born, Pete de Freitas wrecked his motorcycle and died. It was June 14, 1989.
Pete was inducted into the club; he was twenty-seven years old.
~~~
In Numerology, the number one signifies potential. “It symbolizes creative essence that hasn’t been materialized… [Life Path 1 people] attract people through their ideas…strive to invent, be pioneers and have a strong desire to create something new… They are idea generators.”
Is it exceptionally coincidental, or can it be possible – that I am tracing back multiple past lives? Before I was me, was I Pete de Freitas? Was I a man who searched for something through substances, only to succumb to death at age twenty-seven? Is my affinity for bikers in this lifetime based on my fatality on a motorcycle in the last one?
Before I was Pete de Freitas, could I have been Ernest Hemingway?
Why couldn’t Hemingway live out his life to a natural death? What idea of his had he not generated?
Why do I dream of this haunted building? Was I a woman, whose husband needed merely the signature of a doctor to lock me up? If this was my life before Hemingway, the timing would be right. Was I the architect? That’d explain my knowledge of the underground passages. Had I worked here? Had I studied here? Taught here? Maybe I was a prisoner.
Could I, the drug pushing prodigal Gonzo daughter, have been a nun?
Maybe I chose to be a man for my next two lives, because I wasn’t ready to be a woman so soon.
Maybe it all comes back to the twin I absorbed in the womb. Am I a chimera? Had I absorbed a male twin, needing the strength from both sexes to survive in this lifetime… or did I absorb a girl? Did I think I needed double female strength, double feminine energy, to finally achieve my life purpose?
Did I also absorb my twin’s karmic debt? Its soulmates?
Did I absorb anything other than questions?
What a wild and beautifully crafted ride. Images from this essay are going to stick in my mind for a while. Thank you.