Surprised, I opened my eyes to find myself standing. My gaze was fixed on a vast crystal blue sky. A soft, icy breeze coiling around the hilltop conveyed the morning cold. I began shivering and asking myself how I got here when a glint of silver caught my attention. I looked over my shoulder to see a bright metal disc with a mirror polish, gigantic in proportion, hanging silently above me. Upon my realization, I was suddenly seized with a terrific force. Some invisible vice locked itself around my whole body; the air crushed from my lungs as it gripped me ever tighter against my consent. A loud metallic click resounded as I strained against what bound me and reverberated inside my brain. The disk and I began to interface. A deluge of images flooded my mental processes. I was a human particulate futtering between states of consciousness and dissolving in equal parts terror and astonishment.
Amidst the churning ocean of digital chatter I was drowning in, a single directive emerged, stronger and louder than any other. It rose above the crashing waves of analog noise and onto a crystal pedestal of clarity. "I was a builder." I was born to construct and fashion walls, towers, houses, bridges, ramparts, and roads in literal and ideological mediums. To create communities and weave together networks. People would be my primary material, igniting their purpose and unifying their goals. However, I was just as capable, maybe more so, of rendering instruments of destruction, of crafting poisons for the body, mind, and soul. I COULD DECONSTRUCT what I or another built, either piece by piece or in wide murderous swaths.
Having delivered its message, the disc released me. Oxygen came rushing back into my lungs along with spacial awareness into my brain. The disc shot upward with the speed of a bullet but with none of the force. Quickly, the sky grew dark, and the stars were again shown. I stood open to the elements. I was stripped down to nearly nothing, exposed physically and emotionally. The dying campfire's dim radiance illuminated my friends, cocooned in their sleeping bags and blissfully unaware of what had transpired. Dangerously chilled, I trudged back to them with frozen footfalls along a trail of my clothes.
A terrible wave of nausea welled inside me, and I began to dry heave. Over and over till I was dripping with sweat and finally vomited. Exhausted and mentally zeroed out, I collapsed on the hard ground and enjoyed the pre-dawn frigidity. The resulting walking pneumonia clung to me for almost three months, until the New Year of 1994, my sophomore year of High School.
The act of intentional and repeated separation from the group wasn't lost on me. Memories of being called out of class or pulled out of school assemblies to visit persons who disclosed neither their purpose nor identity bubbled up to the forefront of my mind. Institutionalized ostracization and alienation via institutional intrusion by The State of California's Educational Board's ties to black projects and genuine alien forces? For the vast majority, such a supposition need never cross their minds. Lucky them.
Taken.
Abducted.
Removed.
The feeling of division between self and other, fading since my family relocated from California to Idaho, was starkly reaffirmed. I had again been set apart. I was anointed not by sacred or holy oil as in my adult life's numerous religious and spiritual initiations but by otherworldly light and sound. I knew of the distance in close proximity and the feeling of separation, even in a crowd. Understanding these paradoxes would always and inevitably cause cracks in the foundation of all my relationships. However, through these fissures, I could access the liminal spaces between the worlds and experience interdimensionality.
If there was a solace to be taken, I would take it as this: I could at least be an architect of creation and traveler of realities. In exchange for eliminating my sense of societal normalcy or being relegated to the base act of mindless consuming, in contrast to so many others, I was granted that. I was long beyond the false sense of permanence. I suppose I couldn't miss the feeling of authentic security if I'd never known it. Still, I could fantasize about it and be jealous of others who had it.
Maybe I was like the cat who would bolt for the open door and the wild and uncertain, no matter how warm and cozy it was inside. Freedom to me had that irresistible siren's call. I suspected the dark figure that ceaselessly followed me resulted from wandering down shadowed corridors during my frequent early childhood astral and real-time projections. How frighteningly accurate that hypothesis was would soon be realized.
-Kevin Wikse, Strange Strangers: Tales of Childhood of Alien Abduction.
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