I HAVE HEARD PEOPLE SAY BEFORE that your life can change forever in a single day. I never thought it could really be true, but that was before Jackson Chandler moved into the house across the street from mine. His mere presence literally made me dizzy and nauseous. The few times we had actually touched caused me to blackout and experience episodes full of strange visions of another life. Memories like from a dream.
And yet, I felt this unexplainable draw to him. I had to be near him, always. I fell in love long before I even realized that it had happened. Oddly enough, he had fallen just as hard for me too. But our love could not be explored because of the episodes.
On Halloween 2009, Jackson and I were supposed to be getting dressed up in Victorian era costumes to attend our friend Cody’s party, but he ran into me on the stairs and caused me to blackout suddenly and take a horrible tumble.
Battered and bruised, I lay at the foot of his stairs seeing vivid images of myself in a beautiful white gazebo on a spring day with the man I loved. This man, whom I could not see, proposed to me with the sweetest words I had ever heard. But when I’d said yes and he looked up at me, I was amazed to see my new boyfriend, Jackson, staring lovingly back at me.
After Jackson and his parents spent hours explaining about EVE (Essence Voyager Era), a gift that I apparently inherited from my dad’s brother, Monte, I was more baffled and confused than ever before. This gift, or curse, I am not sure which, allowed me to fall asleep in one plane of existence and awaken in another, making it so I was living parallel lives. I spent half of my existence in the twenty-first century and the other half in the late nineteenth. Jackson and his family were also afflicted with the same ability.
None of it made any sense to me, nor seemed remotely possible. I could not wrap my brain around the idea that because of this EVE thing, every night when I fall asleep here in 2009 my soul awakens to an alternate life in 1878. Discovering that my soul traveled along parallel planes every night aroused a sense of uneasiness in me that I cannot describe.
Even stranger was when Jackson sat next to me on the couch, closer than we had ever been before, and for the first time I felt nothing. No dizziness, no cold chills, no nausea—nothing but an amazing love for him. I reached out my hand as if to touch him, but instantly decided to take full advantage of the lack of negative side effects that I normally experienced in close proximity to him and pressed my lips gently against his soft, full lips.