8.
I full-on had a conversation with something, and that’s exactly how I’d describe it: coming between walls. I was alone. At the time I’d been offered a position in DC (I was living in California) when this gravelly voice started shouting at me, “STAY HERE!”. I say shouting, but despite its intensity, the volume never exceeded a whisper. After trying to echo-locate it outside, or from the apartment below me, I became convince the source was undoubtedly the corner of the living room.
This voice was so cruel and judgmental. It blithely recited to me the kinds of sins it could only have observed as a constant, restless presence, bearing silent witness to my moral failings and too-frequent insincerity.
Ever the skeptic, I assumed the voice was some vivid hallucination, my own conscience come to collect upon a decade’s worth of neglected debt. So I asked it, with all the detached confidence of a forgone intellectual checkmate, how large, in acres, was the city I lived it? I didn’t know the answer, so its answer would allay any doubts as to the voice’s origin.
It responded. The number was laughably small, I explained. This city is much bigger.
It responded, “I was born in 1846.”
It took some Googling, but at the dead end of the rabbit hole he was only 400 acres shy of the historical size.
I don’t live there anymore.
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