My First Seance

My first seance was back in middle school.  My friend Amanda lived in a big old run-down Victorian which I still dream about (though, in my dreams, it’s much bigger and I find that my dreams have infected my memory and so I can’t say for sure which parts are real and which parts are made-up when I try to remember it, even though I spent many, many days there).

Anyway, Amanda would have these sprawling slumber parties, with like twenty girls, and we would all sit in her living room in the dark in a circle trying to call forth spirits.  I so distinctly remember that, but I can’t remember if it ever worked.

We’d also put each other in trances, by rubbing on each other’s temples or eyes, and making the person being put in the trance count down from fifty and, if they started to mess up their counting, we knew they were in a trance and we’d pepper them with questions about which boys they liked and which girls they secretly hated.

I was just thinking about how telling that was, that the big mysterious things we had to put ourselves in some kind of woo-woo state to attempt to navigate were the dead (Death being, I think, the first ancient power we feel tempted to mess with) and the complex interiour lives of our friends.  Do you really like me?  Are you just pretending?  Things we couldn’t quite articulate in the light of day, we found an outlet for there in the dark.

It’s a hard age and one I navigated about as well as a blind hippopotamus, which I guess is how we all are.  I look at SuperMousey and her friends and it seems just as weird and difficult as I remember.

They wanted to me to come in and help them work the Ouija board, because they couldn’t get it to move.  So, I did and it did and they were all convinced I was moving it.

And, well, yeah, duh, that’s how it works.  It just disappointed me that I couldn’t get them to move the planchette if I wasn’t touching it.

Still, it was pretty entertaining.  The kids asked the “spirit” where it was buried and it said, “The ground.”