Chapter 8 - Aftermath

Coincidence Speaks

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After a vintage flashback to a Free Bird wedding, we now return to the latest installment of Coincidence Speaks. Please head this way to start at the beginning.↩️

Chapter 8 finds Paul in the afterglow of an electrifying experience…

Chapter 8

Aftermath

Clara breathed a huge sigh of relief.

The worst was finally over, and they’d made it through an unspeakable amount of suffering together and intact. Her husband was finally back. In fact Paul was walking around acting like a kid in a candy store, as happy and engaged as she had ever seen him.

Things weren't just back to normal, they were better than normal. 

Neither had yet realized that something had irrevocably changed, and there would be no going back. Paul’s world had been lit up by something, something massive and mysterious—and whatever this something was, his life had been rocked at its very foundation.

What’s more, there was an unreservedly loving feminine aspect of it that fully accepted him—flaws and all. This wasn’t that stern father figure God he’d built up out of his early upbringing, demanding supplication for the forgiveness of his inherently sinful nature.

This was something that loved him not in spite of, but because of his flaws! 

A residual spark from the day after Christmas had taken up residence on a permanent basis. It was more than just his leg that had been reconnected.

Paul was a kid in a candy store, immersed within a brand new felt-sense of vital interconnection with everything around him. And it wasn’t a mere intellectual appreciation. This was everything in the world pulsing together as part of the same living, moving essence, and each new moment he was awestruck to find out he was an integral participant all over again, and in fact always had been.

Everything was now alive in its own way—not just people and pets—but trees and plants and rocks and even entire landscapes had their own signature vibrancy, their own living expression. The wind and rain and the sun were pulsing creations of a visceral quintessence that was in everything, yet could not be fully defined or contained.

“I friggin’ knew it—the Force is real!” Paul laughed, his mind turning to a movie quote from Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars:

“The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.” 

Apparently Obi-Wan had been onto something.

Shortly thereafter in the same movie, a much younger headstrong dude by the name of Han offered his two cents on the matter, deadpanning,

“Listen kid—I’ve flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff. But I’ve never seen anything to make me believe there’s one all-powerful Force controlling everything. There’s no mystical energy field that controls my destiny. Anyway, it’s all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.”

Paul Endrum had spent three decades in unquestioning agreement with Han Solo. After all, there had been little reason to believe otherwise. But post-RSD life now insisted upon something very different. He couldn’t move objects around with his mind, and his skill with a lightsaber was next to nil—but in a sudden burst of ecstatic conductivity, he could now sense an interconnective field permeating everything in a way he couldn’t even fathom was possible before. 

Paul speculated that somehow his nervous system had become so “charged” by frequent states of gratitude and joy combined with such vivid inner sensory imagery that it had resulted in some kind of spontaneous bioelectrical phenomenon. One that certainly wasn’t written about in any of the medical journals or anatomy books he’d studied during his RSD tribulations.

“Whatever is going on—I am dying to know more,” he wrote in his journal.

He wouldn’t fully grasp the irony of those words until it was much too late.

Paul checked his watch as he ambled along the neighborhood bike trail, three-year-old Noel in tow, skipping while she held his hand. The second hand etched its way towards 5:15. Almost time to head back for dinner.

Taking her cue, he tried out a couple fledgling skips of his own. “Just six months ago I wasn’t even fit to watch her, and here I am, walking again...” A small outpouring of electricity pulsed within his chest, and the strange time phenomenon happened again. Instead of the second hand ticking away while the hour and minute hands seemed frozen in place, his awareness zoomed out and his mind’s eye suddenly saw all three hands going round and round, tracing the clock face at different speeds, like one of those time-lapse recordings on his phone.

But this time it didn’t stop there. As he looked up from his watch, a river birch tree rose into his field of vision. Clara’s favorite.

Paul blinked.

Within the space of that blink, its entire life cycle flashed within his mind’s eye, from dark moist soil to seed to sapling to a trunk splitting itself into beautiful sprouting geometric branches and leaves, its seeds falling back into the soil… and even as the tree decayed and was reabsorbed into the earth, its fractal essence continued on indefinitely.

Paul blinked again in surprise. It was just a tree in late winter again.

“What the heck was that?”

It felt just like his normal imagination, except he wasn’t trying to imagine anything. The phenomenon was happening organically, of its own volition, toward wherever his attention was tuned. It was as if his awareness of the world would suddenly expand into a different space, a different timestream, and he would experience it simultaneously with his own.

Even at an intellectual level, the sheer volume of events spiraling together for just one of the “common” experiences in his life to occur was mind-boggling. That the world existed at all was pure miraculousness; he’d just taken it for granted before, lost in the monotone hues of “normal” life. When repetition breeds enough familiarity, novelty disappears.

“Every moment is its own timeless miracle,” Paul wrote when he got home. As soon as he read it back saw how clichéd the sentiment was. Hardly worthy of a Hallmark card. But it didn’t matter—the truth of the feeling was indescribable anyway.

Days and weeks flowed together, and Paul found himself wondering, “Maybe this is ‘enlightenment?’” Whatever that meant. He had to look it up. It wasn’t.

Everything wasn’t all hippity-dippity puppies and rainbow sandwiches, of course. Even though every moment was brand new, not all of them were pleasant. His daughter’s poopy diapers remained poopy diapers in all of their glory and splendor, regardless of any newfound state of timeless awe.

After a while, Paul’s logical left brain began jutting in, a little self-righteously to be honest, first questioning and then doubting whether anything had really happened at all, whether the electric heartrending experience was really just an exceptionally vivid dream. But his ribcage and chest area continued to stay physically sore for a full month afterward, and that alone was impossible to ignore. He could still feel the residual stretch every time his lungs filled with a deep breath. 

Something real had happened.

End Chapter 8

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Chapter 9 will post Friday, April 5th. Thanks for being here in live interactive real time! Comments and feedback always welcome.

Would love to hear how you think the story is going so far, what you’d like to see more of (and/or less of!)

In gratitude,

E.T. Allen