PART II: Chapter 7 - The Day After Christmas

Coincidence Speaks

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Welcome to Part II of Coincidence Speaks - the novel!

To start at the beginning, please head this way.

Chapter 7

The Day After Christmas

While the gut-wrenching hellfire of RSD was over, something new had been planted in the fertile void of its absence. Something much more subtle, yet somehow much more profound. Paul could feel it growing within him, far beneath the surface, like interlacing mycelium filaments expanding a root network in the hidden depths.

All he had ever wanted was for the suffering to end. But now that it had, the sudden opportunity to live a normal life unburdened by crippling pain was almost incomprehensible. Overwhelming.

Each new moment, each and every breath was permeated by something, something akin to a feeling of gratitude. But that wasn’t nearly it. This was much more potent, more primordial, an ancient timelessness seeping up from a sacred well within.

Whatever this something was, he wasn’t sure if he could contain it.

The holiday season had arrived for the Endrum family, and Paul erupted out of bed on Christmas morning like the wide-eyed child he once was thirty years ago. The child who still believed in magic.

Noel squealed with delight at the overnight transformation of their living room. Somehow, a breathtaking array of brightly wrapped gifts had materialized out of thin air under a tree that lived indoors. All of it just for her.

“This is every bit as perfect as the beach scene,” Paul thought, seeing Christmas through both her eyes and his own. But it wasn’t in his head anymore. It was real, happening right in front of him. His chest ached with nearly unbearable joy.

That night, Paul went to bed with a heart so full he was unable to sleep.

As he lay there, wired and awake, Clara long asleep by his side, a sequence of profound questions bubbled up from out of the blue, bringing Paul into a deep, contemplative silence.

“What is the nature of life? Why does it exist? And who am I in all of this?” 

He caught himself thinking about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy again, whereby the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything… was the number 42. But unfortunately for the characters in that novel, no one could remember the original question.

Paul suddenly knew exactly what his question was.

“What is the Truth?” Paul held the inquiry with genuine sincerity in his heart. He could actually feel it there, in the middle of his chest. Then he closed his eyes.

In the early morning hours of silent predawn blackness, a thunderous whooshing sound yanked Paul out of deep sleep, rattling his bones. Rumbling closer and closer, it sounded like a freight train approaching his two story suburban home, shaking the walls, about to tear through its stickbuilt frame like matchsticks.

“My God it’s a tornado!” he exclaimed, still in that disjointed limbo space between sleeping and waking.

The entire house shook and spun around him. He looked around frantically, half expecting spinning cows, Toto, or the wicked witch at the very least—but he couldn’t see anything. His entire field of vision was enveloped within an enormous shimmering black vortex.

“This is NOT a dream…” he realized, fully waking and hurling himself out of bed to wake Clara and grab Noel and take shelter…

Except nothing happened. His physical body had been completely detached from his will to move it, pinned down by the rushing onslaught of the powerful storm all around him. He was totally immobilized, just like when he’d woken up in the operating room.

That’s when he realized it wasn’t the house, it was him—

He was vibrating from the inside.

At this shocking realization everything abruptly stopped, and there was… nothing. An impossibly, infinite nothing, a feeling of unfathomable depth and limitless space. Yet the moment felt… pregnant somehow, like something was about to happen, something important.

Something was about to happen, and the tornadic roar returned and began accelerating now, rumbling faster and faster like a jet engine taxiing down the runway cleared for final takeoff, accompanied by a strange juxtaposition of primal dread and giddy excitement, leading up to something he was both looking forward to and desperate to avoid…

From the unknown depths a massive surge of charged energy crystallized and the momentum gathered within him, like crackling electricity in the air just before a lightning strike. A single pair of panicked words flashed through his head as the pressure built to a thundering crescendo:

“… oh shit

… oh shit

… oh SHIT!”

Something detonated right in the middle of his chest. 

A supernova of ecstatic electricity exploded from the core of his heart, radiating in all directions. It was… pure, unadulterated, undistilled JOY. This was not in his head, this was not a dream; this was the most vital and visceral experience Paul had ever had.

And somewhere, in a tiny little compartmentalized place far “below”—wherever the heck that was—a part of him was quite concerned that he was about to die of a heart attack. That his physical heart simply couldn’t handle this kind of amperage. And to another part of him, this seemed wholly fascinating. Amusing, even.

Abruptly a rushing gulp of air swelled in, refilling empty lungs with a resusciative gasp, and the tidal wave of electricity subsided smoothly back to its unknown source.

“What. The. Heck. Just. Happened.”

In an early morning darkness still strangely shimmering all around, Paul looked down at a pair of ten-fingered appendages. They seemed to faintly glow around the edges.

"Whose hands are these?”

As the body he was in slowly regained motor control, it eventually dawned on him that they were, in fact, his own. He took them and cautiously poked and prodded around his chest, fully expecting shattered ribs and a jagged hole in his chest. It felt as if his sternum had been cracked wide open.

But everything was somehow completely intact.

Opening a journaling app on his phone, trembling thumbs tried to put whatever had just occurred into a few disjointed sentences:

“2:45 am 12/26 felt infinite joy fill my heart with a rushing sound. I mean it was awe inpouring. Do not ever forget.” 

And he fell into the deepest, most peaceful sleep he’d ever known.

The next day Paul awoke to a different world than the one he’d fallen asleep to. There was something very unusual going on, but he couldn’t seem to put his finger on it.

Something… was missing. Something that had been an integral part of him for a long, lonnnnnng time, damn near an eternity, something that had been really important at one point—but for the life of him, he couldn’t remember what it was.

He scraped through his memory, trying to reconnect the lost thread, trying to remember… and it finally came to him all at once: it was fear! Somehow, there was no longer any sense of fear in him.

Completely fascinated by this development, Paul tried to locate some remnant, even some sort of mild anxiety about the future or regret about the past, but quite simply… couldn’t find any negative emotional charge. And he couldn’t generate those feelings anymore either, even when trying to imagine fearful things. 

It was as if he’d become lucid in the middle of a frightening dream, and the recognition of it meant that the dream no longer held the same power over him.

All that remained was a strangely familiar feeling—an ancient cellular remembrance—that everything… was 100% okay just as is, because it had all led to here. It had all led to now. That, from one very different but somehow very legitimate perspective, even through all of his suffering, everything was actually all good—not only that, but it always had been.

“How is this possible?” Paul thought. “In this dog eat dog world, and its endless wars and suffering, of haves and have nots, of survival of the fittest… how is it possible to feel such joy for life in the midst of such collective pain and sorrow?” 

He had no logical answers. But man alive—all he wanted to do was just share his newfound revelation with the rest of the world. Stick his head out of his suburban second story window and shout out Tiny Tim-style, “Merry Christmas everyone! Everything is all good—and if not don’t worry it’s just a matter of time!”

Instead, he reached over and tapped Clara lightly on her shoulder. 

“Hey!”

Clara blinked back at him, half asleep, rubbing at her eyes.

“So uh, this is gonna sound weird, but my heart somehow freakin’ exploded last night, and I just woke up this morning knowing for a fact that every single moment is actually a peak moment – its own miracle in its own unique way. That joy and pain are really just two sides of the same coin.”

Clara blinked again.

Paul plowed on, heart pounding with excitement. “It’s like… there’s unlimited potential in everything… like every moment is in its own perfect balance between spark and potential, connecting past and future together in the present. And the only real choice I or we or anyone really has in the whole shebang… is to approach life with curiosity and awe, or not.”

Clara seemed to nod almost imperceptibly, and Paul flattered himself, thinking, “Wow – maybe there’s real profound wisdom here.” But then again, maybe she just hadn’t woken up yet. 

He continued on: “We’re like living witnesses to the fact that the function of life itself is simply to transform everything into higher and higher spirals of expression. And everything already is perfect when perceived within its own stage of evolution.”

 Concluding with this particular ‘gem’:

“At an absolute level, all of the seemingly unjust and awful suffering in the world is the organic result of the friction that ignites the eternal divine spark in everyone and everything.”

Clara finally raised her eyebrows and said, “Well, I mean yeah. I could’ve told you that.”

Clichés be damned, that morning felt like Paul had been born into the first day of the rest of his life. Indeed, every happy ending of every popular Hollywood movie came flooding to mind all at once, and he flew out of bed like Scrooge on Christmas, Bill Murray the day after Groundhog Day, Marty McFly watching his family reappear on a Polaroid in Back To The Future, and Nemo finally finding his parents.

Life was brand new, again, in every moment. And the strangest thing kept happening: he was getting all emotional about it. The tiniest, most unassuming events were now a constant threat to either bring Paul to laughter or move him to tears, sometimes both at once. This was quite an inexplicable overnight development for a business professional who’d always considered himself quite stoic and rational, especially when it came to managing his emotions.

And time… time seemed different now too. The days, hours, minutes and seconds… they all seemed to have stretched out and connected together. Seconds didn’t tick now, they… spiraled. One moment coalesced into another—a constant swirl of color and sound and movement that never ended, and never began. 

Paul looked at the watch encircling his wrist. Even as the tiny insect antenna second hand ticked from notch to notch, his mind’s eye saw the second hand, minute hand, and hour hand all going round and round, tracing the exact same circle, only at differing rates of speed to one another.

He did his best to describe the simplicity of the feeling in writing for his own future posterity, in case he ever forgot:

“Remember being five years old? Remember how long and how colorful summers used to be? How every single day was its own flowing story, for better or for worse, its own complete little universe? So simple and so ordinary, yet so magical and extraordinary… REMEMBER… remember the truth of every moment being NEW…

Whatever the heck is going on, it’s like I’m seeing the world through the eyes of a kid again—but this time with the bigtime added perk of not having to deal with authority figures four times my size, always mandating chores and bedtimes and other super annoying adult stuff!”

The gravity of Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy had been flipped to its polar opposite in one spontaneous moment, and Paul Endrum was left in awe how the gap between horrific suffering and pure bliss was much narrower than he could have ever imagined. More than thirty years of frantically trying to engineer a traditional life of material comfort in order to avoid pain had suddenly burst right out his chest. In its place was a willingness to experience and to feel anything life wanted to throw at him, pain included—no longer out of a defensive, reactive fear—but from a natural sense of curiosity. Of trust.

He couldn’t stop gently laughing to (and at) himself.

“Dude—why on earth did you spend any of the past 30 years in any fear at all?”

It was now quite apparent that Paul really didn’t have much of a clue about much of anything anymore, and that, seemed the most hilarious development of all.

End Chapter 7

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Chapter 8 will post Friday, March 29th. Thank you for being here in live interactive real time! Comments and feedback always welcome.

In gratitude,

E.T. Allen