MR. NOBODY

        

        When I was a child I spent my play time in the woods playing with my dead sister and my ‘imaginary friend’ named Mr. Nobody.   My sister looked just like me, but Mr. Nobody, he was a skeleton with top hat and tails.  How many two year olds do you know that would make up a friend like that?  I have vivid recollections of what he looked like, how he moved and laughed.  Once when I grew to close to the river he bade me come back toward him and I did.  It seemed he was always looking after me.  
My brothers are five and seven years older than I am and when you’re little that age made a huge difference.  When they did look after me they taught me how to pick up snakes and crawdads.   I was fearless and out to impress the brothers of course because my family was my whole world than.   They were often too busy to watch me or too cool to play with me, but I was never alone.  Mr. Nobody and my sister were always there.
I talked about them too, after a while my family got tired of me ‘lying’ all the time.  Once on a family trip between Indiana and Pennsylvania for a family reunion, my mother decided to ‘get rid’ of Mr. Nobody once and for all.  She decided that we left him at a Sohio Gas Station and continually reinforced the idea any time I brought him up.  It was a somewhat traumatic experience, but I was already getting used to those by the age of four.   Something DID happen, because I seemed to loose my ‘sight’ a bit after that.  I didn’t see him anymore and I only felt my sister, I didn’t see either one of them again, not for a long time.
My parents divorced when I was four, my father abandoning my brothers and I to live with a mentally ill mother.     When I was five my mother told me that my grandmother, my fathers mother, had died and that I couldn’t go see my dad because he was going to the funeral.  Well, I was maybe six or seven and I had no idea how to act around death so I never said anything to my dad about it.  The next time I went to visit my father, the phone rang and I was the only one around.  When I picked up the phone it was my grandmother, the same one that was supposed to be dead.  I learned that the woman I trusted more than anyone in my whole world was a liar and that I couldn’t trust her.  If I couldn’t trust my own mother, I couldn’t trust anyone, not to my way of thinking.  So I withdrew a great deal into myself.  
At the age of eight I started writing regularly on my front porch, it’s a habit I never broke.  If I live somewhere with a front porch, it’s my favorite journaling area.  Writing was a means of escape from a continually decreasing and unhealthy family life.  My mother was physically and emotionally abusive.  Though I do not doubt that she had very little control over it due to her deteriorating mental health, that means nothing to a child.  I felt trapped.  The many years that I lived with her were very hard and they shaped my life into something unpleasant. 
  When I was eight my mother’s second husband died from cancer.  The night he died, she and I had almost the exact same dream that he came into our rooms and said goodbye.  I was horribly guilt ridden and in silence about it, because I hated him and I wished him dead.  So of course I believed it was my fault and I never told anyone that until I was well into my twenties.  In hindsight my mother was the first to remarry and I villianized him because of it.  He was a kind man and didn’t deserve the way I treated him, so that was another mind fuck I bared alone, from lack of anyone I trusted.  The morning after his death my mother and I were talking about our dreams of him.  At that point I also brought up the fact that I have seen the dead before because I used to play with my sister, who looked exactly like me.  She went extremely pale and proceeded to tell me that I had been a twin, but they didn’t want to tell me for fear of it influencing me in a negative way.
I was weird.  I stuck my nose in a book and rarely came out for anything except choir.  I read Stephen King when other little girls were reading Harlequin Romances, I listened to punk and alternative music when bubble gum pop was all the rave with the girls.  At the age of eleven my oldest brother escaped to college, my other brother started dating his lifetime wife and found religion.  He stayed away as much as possible.  In fact I felt completely abandoned by both of them.  After they both left for college I was alone with my mother for six years in that house.  My madness was her madness, it was a hell I don’t talk about and have a lot of lost time for that period of my life.    In high school I was punk and weird, they were izod wearing snobtastic future republicans.  Through out all these years my sight came and went, I had some very powerful experiences that convinced me I was either mad, like my mother, or there were a lot of things in the Universe that I didn’t understand.   I read everything I could about the paranormal, spirituality and witchcraft, these are passions that I still study to this day, thirty plus years later.   At fourteen I dedicated myself to the Wicca path under the light of the full moon and it felt completely natural to me.  I am pure Celt in my ancestry down to my red hair and blue eyes.  I was drawn to study the Celtic traditions and adorned myself in Celtic jewelry and clothes.  The Goddess Brigid was the main deity that I affiliated with.  There had been failed attempts at raising me as an Episcopalian, but Christianity never made sense to me and it still doesn’t.  The best thing that ever came from Church for me was meeting my life long friend in Sunday school.
I know you’re sitting there thinking that this is supposed to be about Mr. Nobody and I haven’t mentioned him in several paragraphs.  My relationship with him is extremely personal and tied into all of this.  
In my early 20’s I was a shining and healthy person, obviously flourishing from living on my own and no longer weighed down by my oppressive and sick mother.  I went to visit my oldest brother once and I was looking through  his books.  At the age of seven I was introduced to the world of D&D and my love for it never went away.   The book I was looking through was an extension of a table top game.   When I sat down, the book fell open immediately to a page with a picture of skeleton with a top hat and tails on.  It was Mr. Nobody, he was my ‘Drop Dead Fred’ friend and my heart sort of rose into my throat.  I even said to my brother, “Look, it’s Mr. Nobody.’  
I have vividly detailed memories of what he looked like when I was a child, how he was animated like any other living creature is solidified in my memory like something out of a CGI film today.  He was never imaginary to me.  I still felt a loss at having been separated from him.  When I looked at the picture more closely, the description beneath the picture said, Baron Samedi.  If you were a two year old and someone told you his name was Baron Samedi, don’t you think Nobody sounds incredibly similar?  Well I did.  I was extremely perplexed by it all and began to do research.  Research is my first stop whenever I want to learn about anything.  The strangest thing of all to me was that Samedi is a Loa of the Voodoun faith, a faith that I had never felt any connection to personally.  So how was this entity attached to me and why?  I invited him back into my life and asked him to help me discover the answers I was so curiously looking for.  
Over the next few months, several very important things happened.  My mother gave me a box a pictures and keep sakes that she had saved for me.  In it was a copy of my baptism, the script and everything.  I was baptized Catholic on November 1st, 1970.  There are a few very peculiar things about this fact.  I was raised Episcopalian, not Catholic.   For some there may not be much of a difference, but from my fathers very Irish Catholic side of the family, there was a HUGE difference.  The other strange thing about it all was that Baron Samedi’s holy day is November 1st, AND, get this, he was, is, the protector of children and the Voodoo Loa of the Dead.  The Voodoo religion was, is, a mish mosh of spiritual African practices  and Catholicism.   Apparently I was baptized Catholic to appease my grandmother who was a devout Irish Catholic to her dieing day.  
Whenever I was with Mr. Nobody as a child, my sister was always there.   I’ve always had ‘the sight,’  just like my mother.  The difference between a psychic and a psychotic being the ability to shield yourself from the other worldly.   I was beginning to believe it was because of these two or that they, at least, had something to do with it.  He is the protector of children and the dead?  He protected me and my sister and I believe he still does.  
The next miraculous clue was so profound, I still remember it in vivid detail.  My oldest brother and I went to visit our brother and his family near Chicago.  While there we went to the Natural History Museum.  As my oldest brother and I walked up the steps there was a huge banner proclaiming the traveling exhibit about the History of Voodoo was there for a limited time and we just looked at each other in disbelief, and yes, at this point, he was aware of what was happening with the Baron and myself.  Needless to say I B-Lined it to the exhibit and was ready to devour every bit of knowledge I could about it.   When I came to the case about the Baron I read everything, scoured all the artifacts with my eyes and just as I was about to move on I noticed in tiny print at the bottom, the Barons consort/wife is said to be the Saint Brigit who was originally modeled after the Goddess Brigid to convert the heathens of the countryside to Catholicism.  The Goddess Brigid, if you remember, is the Goddess I felt most affiliated to and often prayed to, danced to, made altars to, etc.  I stood there in stunned silence for a long time.  I still have never felt very connected to the path of Voodoo, but the Baron and I are inexplicably linked.
This all brought the Baron and I back together, not that he ever left, but I had stopped seeing him for those many years do to my mothers child psychology crap.  I have worked with and honored him in many ways since these discoveries.  He is intricately linked to my sister and myself as we are to one another.  There were too many things that linked us, too many instances to ignore.  I can’t explain it all, but it’s strangely comforting to know that the Loa of the Dead has got my back.   As we near his day, I can feel him, I can feel the Veil growing thin and my ancestors wanting to come for a visit.  To me it is comforting and far from scary.  Though, I must say, I feel that he has and will protect me until my death and most likely beyond, so, messing with me or my family, probably not a good idea.  I can hear him laughing as I write these words.  Mr. Nobody, turned out to be somebody after all.