I sat on the porch with a glass of iced tea in my hand, rocking slowly in my chair and watching my neighbors unload their car, bringing out things from their time out. I was trying to cool down. It had finally cooled off outside. For the last few weeks it had been too hot to sit out here, even in the evening.
The air was still thick and humid, but every now and then a little breeze moved across the porch. My brown-sugar skin had a slight sheen from wiping my forehead with the back of my hand so many times. I let my mind wander and gazed out into the sky.
A flicker.
What was that? It didn’t look like a firebug, I answered myself in my mind.
“Alex!”
“Alexis!” the sharp male voice called again.
“Alexis D. Sharchar!” Louder this time, and more stern.
I shook myself out of whatever trance I must have been in.
“Yes, Trai’Jon,” I said, matching the tone he had used.
“Where are you?”
“I’m sitting out here on the porch. Did you need something?”
“No, I just didn’t see you, and Tank was sitting by himself. So I was wondering.”
“Okay,” I answered. “I’ll be inside in a few. I’m just enjoying the lovely evening.”
And I returned to my unofficial neighborhood watch patrol from the porch. Most people were home by now. A few cars passed, headlights sweeping across the street before they disappeared around the corner, and somewhere nearby I could hear a television through an open window. Nothing seemed out of place. Just another hot summer night.
I began to think about Trai and me. Trai had been part of my life for years. We grew up in Delaware. He was my high school sweetheart, the boy with the mischievous grin and eyes that could get him into almost anything. Our relationship had never been perfect. His eyes wandered, and there were times I questioned whether love was enough to keep two people together. Still, we stayed. Our lives became so intertwined that separating his dreams from mine became almost impossible.
Trai built the trucking company he’d always dreamed about. He put everything he had into making it work, and I helped. Behind the scenes, I kept things moving. I worked with a nonprofit helping aspiring entrepreneurs build businesses of their own while I helped Trai build his. Somewhere along the way, partnership became our normal. His dreams became part of my everyday life. Mine waited.
I had once imagined opening a childcare business, but it was never only about owning a daycare. I wanted a place where children could be inspired, motivated, and exposed to things they might not experience regularly, especially children from lower-income areas. I imagined them learning about other cultures, hearing different languages, experiencing different traditions, trying things they didn’t have access to every day. I wanted them to see beyond what was familiar. I could see myself in it, though not necessarily running the day-to-day operations. I imagined someone else handling that part while I focused on the vision. The children. The inspiration. The possibility of helping them see something bigger for themselves.
Back then, I could even picture Trai in the kitchen. He loved to cook, so in the beginning I had already imagined him cooking for the children. We had our dreams mapped out in our heads, each of us playing a part in what we thought we were building together. That was before he decided to pursue the trucking business. At least, that’s how it was sold in the beginning. Funny how things change.
Then Trai’s dream began gaining momentum, and I put mine down. I told myself it was love. Family. Sacrifice. There would always be time later. I believed that for a long time. I didn’t know how much a person could bury while still convincing herself she was living.
But something had begun pulling at that buried place. I could feel it. Not an answer. A thread. I looked toward the sky again and wondered if that thread had finally been found. I didn’t know where it led. I only knew I’d seen something, and whatever it was, it had seen me too.
I kept sitting and rocking, the breeze blowing every now and then, and thought about how much our lives had changed together. Trai used to be the person I could talk to about anything. But now it seemed like the things I once shared with him, he found crazy.
That word was sensitive to me. Just a little bit. I had heard it in one form or another from my family growing up, because I saw things in ways they either didn’t share or were too afraid to say out loud. The real word for it was intuition, and I was not afraid to listen to mine.
It’s funny how, when they want to know something, that same “crazy,” as they call it, becomes great advice.
I laughed out loud to myself at the thought.
Then my attention was drawn upward again.
There it was. That same flicker from before.
At first I thought it was a star. Then it moved. Not fast. It drifted across the sky as if it were floating on something I couldn’t see, from one side of the darkness to the other, and then it slowed. I leaned forward in my chair.
The light around it seemed to breathe. Gold appeared first, then blue, then white, purple, and green. The colors rolled through the orb one after another, but they didn’t flash like lights. They flowed into each other, brightening and fading as it moved. Then it pulsed, once, a soft glow pushing outward from its center before settling back in.
I blinked.
It wasn’t flying like an airplane. It wasn’t falling. It wasn’t moving in any pattern I recognized. It floated, paused, pulsed, and drifted again. I set my tea down beside me, and the orb stopped.
I stared at it. It was bright enough to command my attention, but the light wasn’t harsh. If anything, I found myself leaning toward it.
“Are you real?”
The orb pulsed. I stopped breathing for a second.
“Can you understand me?”
Another pulse. This time the colors moved faster. Gold rolled into blue. Blue slipped into white. Purple flickered at the edges before green washed through the center. I leaned closer. Whatever this was, it wasn’t simply sitting in the sky. It was moving, and somehow it felt like it was moving with me.
I was being answered.
For a few moments everything else disappeared. No phone. No family. No responsibilities. No tomorrow. Just me, beneath the night sky, staring at something I couldn’t explain. I didn’t have a name for it. I didn’t need one. Not yet.
Buzzz… Buzzz… Ring…
I jumped at the vibration of my phone and reached for it, keeping my eyes on the sky.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mommy.”
Sataria. A smile spread across my face.
“Hello, Sun.”
Her voice always had a way of pulling me back into the moment.
“How was your day?” I asked.
“It was good, Mommy. How was yours?”
I looked up again. The orb was not there. Or maybe it was. I couldn’t tell.
“It was good,” I said.
I didn’t tell her what I’d seen. Not this time. Usually, Sataria was the person I talked to about the strange things that found their way into my life, the things I noticed before anyone else did. But this one stayed with me. Maybe I was tired. Maybe there was another explanation. Maybe.
When we ended the call, I lowered the phone into my lap and sat there a while longer. Stars scattered across the darkness. Nothing moved. Still, the night didn’t feel the same. Neither did I. There hadn’t been a voice, or a sudden revelation. Just a strange sensation moving through me, like remembering something I had never been taught.
I had believed I knew the shape of my life. I knew the dreams I’d put aside, too. Sitting there beneath that sky, I began to wonder if knowing my life and knowing myself were two different things.
Later that night, I stood in the bathroom getting ready for bed. I gathered my long, curly, light-auburn hair and twisted it into a bun, then secured it beneath my silk scarf. I looked at myself in the mirror one last time before reaching for the light.
“Protect my peace,” I whispered.
I paused. The words were familiar. I’d said them enough times to other people. Protect your peace. Protect your energy. Know when to walk away. Funny how easy it was to give advice you weren’t following yourself.
“Limit your conversations, Alexis. Especially with people who are doing the most.”
I smiled. “Which is basically everybody around me right now.”
Maybe I needed to get back to prayer. Meditation. Quiet mornings. Time when nobody needed anything from me. And Tonya? I already knew I needed some distance there. The competitiveness. The comparisons. That had never been my game. What was meant for me would be mine. At least, that’s what I believed.
Tank, our Morkie, was somewhere in the house, probably settling down for the night. Our fur baby, mine and Trai’s. From the bedroom, I heard Trai’s tired voice through the bathroom door.
“Alexis? Are you about finished? I’m fading fast out here.”
I laughed. “Almost there, Trai.”
I finished up, turned off the light, and walked into the bedroom. Trai was already in bed. I slipped beneath the covers beside him. He lay there knocked out, back turned away from me, as if he were the only one in the bed. His body was so warm, and I placed my back to his.
I lay there for a while, eyes open, staring at the fan blades turning on the nightstand, where I had placed it to get the perfect balance of the heat from Trai and the cool from the fan, hoping to fall asleep soon.
Tomorrow was another day. I just didn’t know yet that tomorrow would begin revealing pieces of a life I thought I already knew.