When you feel one coming, it’s called an aura.  That’s not a word heard often, is it?  Once, as I stood on the corner of Broadway and something, a woman with sapphire eyes and tarnished silver rings on every finger stopped beside me.  She told me I had a powerful aura.  For just $49 (there was a special) she would tell me my future. 
            “I already know,” I said and crossed the street staring down the glowing red hand.  
            My grandmother had another kind of aura, although we never called it that.  We never knew there was a name for it.  I have the image of her sitting on the back porch after supper in the dusty pink evenings.  She wore strands of long turquoise beads around her neck, her skin wrinkled like crepe paper in the amber porch light.  With a sweating glass of sweet tea in one hand, she would extend her arm out, palm up and let it float in the night air.  
            “We best go in now,” she would say.  “Rain’s comin’.”
            Carrying herself like she was made of glass, she would head inside the house and float from room to room, shutting the windows.  She didn’t have air conditioning; didn’t need it, didn’t miss it, and didn’t miss not needing it.  Minutes later, the sky split open and water dripped out, sliding down the arms of the weeping willows in the backyard.  I never looked for rainclouds before her predictions, but now I wish I had.  Forethought is something I don’t have a drop of.  But my afterthoughts – they could fill a lake.
            If you feel one coming, it’s considered lucky.  There’s a brief window of time to prepare for it.  You find a soft surface.  If it’s just the floor, you throw down something soft: a fleece blanket or quilt.  Something to catch your fall.  You move away from sharp edges.  Spit out your gum.  Lie down on your side and wait.           

December 2, 2018
            Walking somewhere at night, it’s dark but the ground is glowing white and it’s very cold.  Fat snowflakes fall like question marks. People fade in and out of the darkness, wearing black masks, carrying skis.  I follow them but the whiteness thickens and surrounds me.  I call for help, but they keep walking. The cold worsens until I can no longer move.  I am buried.

            There are seventeen cement steps leading down into the subway at Lexington and 68^th Street.  First, there are eight, then there is a sharp right hand turn, then nine more.  The edge of the bottom step has been eroded by a million footsteps and curves like the top of a tombstone.  If you look closely at the ground in front of that last step, there is a reddish brown stain.  Like the inkblot test, the shape that you see can be analyzed to reveal your inner thoughts, emotions, fears.  You may see a lightning bolt or a butterfly or the coast of southern Italy.  When I see the stain, all I see is me.  That is the place where it happened the first time.
            “Tell me where you were exactly,”  the doctor said.
            “68th Street,” I said.  “I was walking to work.”
            “Did you feel light-headed or nauseous?
            “No, I felt fine.”
            “How did you sleep the night before?”
            “I slept fine.”
            “Did you eat breakfast?”
            “I never eat breakfast,” I said.
            “You should always eat breakfast.   It’s the most important meal of the day,” the doctor said.  “Were there any odd sensations?  Any pungent scents or flashing colors?”
            I shook my head. 
            “You know what to do if you ever feel one coming, don’t you?” he asked finally.
            “Duck and cover.”

            New York Post – December 5, 2018
“Flurry Fury!  City paralyzed by Blizzard!”

            I told the doctor everything I could remember.  I told him that when I woke at the bottom of the subway stairs, I saw a dark shadow.  I did not mean dark as in a brunette nor did I mean dark as in having a dark complexion.  I simply meant dark as in it was not a person, but a shadow of a person.
            You had a seizure, the dark shadow told me.  
            I remember there was blood.  It was stuck in the creases of my palms and dotted along the sleeves of my white coat.  I was lying flat on my back and there were faces all around me.  I remember not knowing anything.   Not who I was or where I was or if I was at all connected to my body or just a floating head.  Strangers surrounded me, tossing questions at me like confetti.  Someone called an ambulance.  And because I have watched enough tired medical dramas, I know that two paramedics in navy blue uniforms came to scoop me off the ground and onto a stretcher, strapping my arms down so I wouldn’t fall out.  They probably pushed the crowd back with a “Nothing to see here, folks” as they carried me out of the subway station.  One of them was probably older, a gray stripe in his hair, married with a kid who was failing out of state college.  The other one was younger, wore his uniform a size too small to show off his boxer build, roughly handsome with a raised-in-Queens swagger who used his job as a pick up line.  
            In the ambulance, maybe they turned on the spinning red siren and sliced through the morning traffic on Lexington.  Maybe they warned me it would pinch just a little before they stuck my arm with the IV, struggling to find a vein because my arms are small, childlike.  Maybe they asked if I had eaten breakfast.  Maybe they offered to call someone, my boyfriend, a relative, or a close neighbor who waters my orchids when I’m away.  
            I hope I gave a response.  I hope I acknowledged them or thanked them.  But in my mind,
that day was a blank sheet of paper that someone tossed out because they never found a pencil.

June 22, 2019
            In my apartment, the sofa and coffee table and books are stacked on top of each other almost to the ceiling.  I’m walking through the stacks looking for something.  The water in my fishbowl begins to ripple.  The floor starts to tremble like I’m standing on the edge of a diving board.  Everything is falling.  I lose my balance and I yell for the shaking to stop, but it doesn’t.     

          Friends came to visit me in my windowless hospital room at Lenox Hill.  The girls from the office brought red velvet cupcakes and a mozzarella tomato sandwich from the deli across the street, extra pickles.  The best friend brought me cherry Chapstick and a tiny bottle of Grey Goose.  We mixed it with the orange juice on my hospital tray and poured it into foam cups for a toast.  We were young and that was how we coped with uncertainty.
            “What are we toasting to?” I asked. 
            “What we always toast to.”   
           “Carpe Diem,” we said.
            “Seize the day,” I said.  “Make your life extraordinary.”
            “Isn’t that a quote from somewhere?” she asked.
            “Everything is a quote from somewhere.”
            She took a photo of me with my head patched in gauze, my lips painted red.  I wrapped my hospital gown around me like a fur and tilted my head to blow the camera a kiss.
            “You look like a movie star,” she said.
            “Marilyn Monroe,” I said.
            “Starring in The Mummy Returns,” she laughed.
            Sometimes, laughter says the things we can’t.
            I stayed in the hospital for three days and four nights.  They stuck white circular electrodes to my head to record my brain waves while I slept.  A long strip of paper buzzed out of the machine all day and all night.  The doctor pointed to the lines on the page, jagged like scribbles on an Etch-A-Sketch, and said everything looked perfectly normal.
            The doctor concluded that the cause of the seizure was hypoglycemia, sleep deprivation, and emotional stress of unknown origins.   I was told to wear flats instead of heels on the walk to work.  I was told by several nurses to start eating breakfast.  The most important meal of the day. 
            “This was likely a one time occurrence,” the doctor told me.  “You’re a very lucky girl.”
            He said in three to five days, the seven stitches in the crown of my head would dissolve.  He said in five to six weeks, my hair would begin to grow back and cover the blotch of pink scalp.  He said in six to nine months, no one would be able to see the purple gash on the back of my head. 
            He was right about everything except one thing. 

New York Post – June 26, 2019
“Shake, Rattle, and Roll: 5.8 Quake Hits City”

            After the fourth one, they sent me to the Sleep Center.  The center was on the third floor of a mottled brick brownstone in Murray Hill.  The outside looked haunted, but the inside felt haunted.  The walls were the color of pink fog and from a certain angle in a certain light, you could tell yourself that you were staring into the horizon.  If I were younger, I would say it was a metaphor for life but because I was older, I said it was a metaphor for something else. 
            The Sleep Center is not how I imagined.  I imagined that the waiting room chairs would be made of goose down pillows and there would be mini stone fountains, water trickling over the pebbles.   I imagined that the wallpaper would smell of sweet lavender.  I imagined that people would come there to sleep.  But the Sleep Center was not a place where people sleep; it was a place where people went to talk about sleeping.
            Some spoke of their difficulty in falling asleep, the bouts of insomnia that struck during late hours.  There was the Catholic woman advised to list the patron Saints to induce sleep, then could not fall asleep until naming at least one hundred.   Others confessed that they fell asleep everywhere.  One man took a $112 nap in the back of a cab and ended up in Atlantic City with no shoes and no shirt.  No luck.  Some spoke about the frightening things that occur during sleep: sleep apnea or sleepwalking or sleep terrors.             That was why I went to the Sleep Center.  I went to talk about the dreams.  The dreams started when the seizures started. I went to talk about my dreams because they started coming true.
            On my first session, I watched a video about the sleep cycle and learned the actual meaning of REM.  On the second session, a woman with emerald eyes and fake gold rings on every finger swung a moonstone on a rope in front of me.  On the third session, they gave me a notebook with a picture of a smiling blue moon and silver sparkling stars, a dream journal.  They told me to write down my dreams every night.  Every inner thought, emotion, fear.  Every single detail had meaning.  Everything was a quote from somewhere.

November 6, 2019
            I knock on the door of a brick building.  No one is home and I wait on the front stoop.  A yellow school bus speeds towards me, filled with children singing songs.  There is rumbling and a cloud of smoke.  I watch as the side of the building melts like lava from a volcano.  I can hear the children’s screams, but I cannot see them.

          I had one in an elevator once.  I pressed the first floor button and when the door opened, they found me face down on the floor.  Another time, it was on the walk home in the precarious time of night when it is either very late or very early.  I woke up two blocks from my apartment to the loud crunch of garbage trucks in the foggy morning.  Because this is a city stuffed with kind strangers, the only thing they stole was my wallet.  People liked to tell me that I was lucky.  You call that lucky? 
            Another time, it was in the middle of a lunch date.  An eatery around the corner from the office, a trendy place with exceptionally small silverware and tiny slivers of food on square black plates.  We were having an argument about the Oxford comma.  To use it or lose it: that was the question.  Suddenly, I was in the back of an ambulance and there was an EMT cutting off the sleeves of my black dress that wasn’t even paid for yet.  My date stayed in the ambulance until we reached the hospital, I’ll give him that much.  He never called again. 
            I like to think that I won that argument.
            I switched anticonvulsant medications frequently.  The first one was Lamictol.  It gave me night sweats and swollen fingers.  Keppra made me irrationally emotional.  I wept once in front of a closed Chase bank at 6:01 PM because I had to deposit a check.  A guard stood on the inside watching me, gesturing to the ATM next door.  But all I could do was cry.
            Sometimes, tears say the things we can’t.  
            We finally settled on Trilectol.  I followed the instructions on the orange bottle and took two tiny yellow pills twice a day.  One with breakfast and one with dinner.  After all the advice, I finally began eating breakfast, the most important meal of the day.   It was the perfect time to read the morning paper.   No hard news before 9 AM, I preferred the shouting headlines of the New York Post.  I like sensationalism with my bowl of Lucky Charms.
            At night, I swallowed the pills with a swig of Stella and although the instructions on the bottle don’t tell you to, they don’t tell you not to.
            It is the opposite of seeing the horizon as a metaphor for life.

New York Post – November 8, 2019
“17 Children Injured: Harlem Building Collapses on Bus!”

            Needles are the only things that frighten me.  I am the girl who faints before donating blood.  I need a handful of frosted animal crackers and two apple juice boxes before I even roll up my sleeve.  When the doctor told me I needed to have an IV for the MRI, I went straight to the fridge.  
            It was called an “MRI with Contrast” because ink was injected into your arm through the IV.  The ink filled in the empty spaces around your brain so that any irregularities or masses become more apparent.   A week or so later, the doctor called with the results.  If he left a message, it was a good sign.  If he kept calling until you were home and asked if now was a good time to talk, it was a bad sign.  The worst of signs. 
            I wish I had said, “No, it is not a good time to talk.  In fact, it will never be a good time to talk.”  That is what I mean when I say forethought.
            The spot on my brain is the size of a cornflake.  It is tucked beneath the temporal lobe in the hippocampus.  It is not the most important part of the brain, it does not hold personality, language skills, or emotional sensory.  I can still recite key phrases from eleventh grade French (où est la bibliothèque) and my eyes gloss over with sentiment when I hear the song about the pyramids along the Nile.  The hippocampus only does one thing: it records.  The cornflake is floating in the middle of my memories.

March 14, 2020
            Do I have wings?  No, but I am soaring in the sky. The feeling of weightlessness, falling in the rain, floating in water but not being wet, unimaginable lightness.  I feel the wind and sun and invincibility.  There’s buildings, rooftops, rivers, and an ocean far beneath me and I have left them behind.  I have left it all behind.

            “I’d like you to come in next week and have a quick biopsy done,” the doctor said.
            “Why?”
            “To confirm that the cells are normal.  And let’s schedule an MRI every few weeks or so to keep an eye on it.”
            “Why?”
            “Just to be certain it doesn’t change or grow.”
            “Has this been causing the seizures?”
            “Possibly.”
            “Has it been causing the dreams?”
            “Possibly.”
            “What happens if the spot gets bigger?” I asked.
            The doctor had a nervous tick when he ran his tongue along his front teeth and smacked his lips.  I knew because I’d seen it.  On the phone, I heard it.
            Shortly after I hung up with him, I dipped into my 401k and booked a flight to Paris. The next day, I gave my two weeks’ notice and carried my life out of the office in a banker’s box.  I popped open the bottle of Dom from on top of my fridge and drank it straight from the bottle.  I made reservations at five star restaurants I had never been and called friends I hadn’t spoken to in years.  I bought three pale violet Jewel orchids.  Orchids have impossible sunlight requirements and rarely last longer than a month.  But their fragile, fleeting beauty seems like a metaphor for something.  

New York Post – March 20, 2020
“166 Dead: AIR FRANCE Flight Goes Down near JFK”            

          If you feel it coming, consider it lucky.

– Anne Marie DeVito

Author’s Note: This piece began as an exercise in combining diverse writing mediums. The use of newspaper headlines and diary entries add a layer of complexity to the narrative. It also experiments with the traditional linear structure as time shifts from past to future. Each detail serves a distinct purpose and should not be overlooked. The ending is left open to interpretation.