A familiar feeling crept over me – it was that of the stagnant, sleepless tiredness that settles in nearly every night. It was twelve-thirty, maybe one. This was sort of normal. I turned over onto my side with a sigh and pulled out my phone, browsing random images and amusingly drunken texts from other people to quell the last energies of the day.
And then, I started to feel… I’d call it “lightheaded” if it weren’t happening from my knees down. It wasn’t the pins and needles feeling – it was of lightness, weightlessness. It tingled slightly, the way it always does. Once I realized it was there, and my brain focused on it instead of the vague haze it had been occupying, it spread quickly up to the bottom of my ribcage. I was expecting it to go farther than that, and encompass my body entirely, but it stopped. I felt it orient towards the edge of the bed… or the space between the bed and the window… or the cross I’d tacked up above it on the wall. I’m not sure – somewhere in that direction, in front of me, as I was lying on my side. Someone was sitting at my bedside, or standing watch over me.
I said, very quietly, so as not to disturb my bed partner, “Brigid?”
Nothing.
But, the feeling didn’t leave – I still tingled and felt like airy static. I still felt the presence beside me. That was something.
I could say I was recalling memories, but I didn’t think of them willingly – the images and sounds were brought to my mental attention from the outside. I know how I recall things normally – and there is nearly always a “fade in” effect. It is never a sharp, instant recollection, from beginning to end. My memories and the way I think about them have a glaze of Vaseline, like the old movies. This? This was instant. That’s how I know it wasn’t my willing these memories to the front of my mind. It was a splice-cut highlight reel of the evening’s ritual. I saw the circle; I saw parts of the ritual. To a certain extent, I could see the airy static energies winging around the room – ones I could only feel when I was there.
I asked, this time silently in my head, “Is that you? Have you come to visit me?”
In an instant, the images in my head changed.
They’re fuzzy now, and get fuzzier the more I think back on them, but they were of faces I did not recognize, of voices that were unfamiliar. They were not the designs or costumes or actors that have been assigned courtesy of Hollywood. But I saw them, sitting around a table, drinking and feasting and carousing. I saw them in battle, armor shining out, the glory of their strength radiating with each swing of hammer and sword and shield. I felt a swelling of pride in me, a wide grin split my lips, and the kind of happiness I have a hard time assigning a word to, as “joy,” “elation,” “ecstasy,” “euphoria,” and even “happiness” itself never really seem to cover it enough, or correctly. And there was a name.
It came into my head in the instant before the tingling lightness in my body left, before I became aware again of the normal nocturnal soundtrack. The name was Thor.
