Celestia

There was no such thing as “one 6 pack”. We drank beer like water, and more often than not, would get into heated debates about obscure subjects. One particular night, with friends over at our apartment, a shouting match begins over a pending documentary we were interested in shooting. “Celestia”, as it would be called, was set to be a real-life docuseries that would end with a seance at the cemetery of a ghost town. After blaming each other for its nonexistence, we issued a challenge to see who would be more courageous in speaking to the spirit world. After beer came the Hennessy, and before long, we were drunk, in a cab, on our way to the old basement in Queens, where we would attempt to contact the next dimension. Camera in hand, I would drunkenly waste the tape of my Canon HV40 in documenting our insanity on the way there, leaving us with nothing but the option of cell phone footage to capture the actual seance. Our condition made a mockery of the experience, and while there have been conflicting reports about what really happened that night, the number of phone calls I made in sheer panic would serve as all the proof anyone would need that I was convinced of what I felt and saw. After constructing our own Ouija board of cardboard and a shot glass, we dimmed the lights and called out. The glass began to move, and the air in the room became thick and cold. While the footage of this night has been lost over time, the feeling of waking up the next morning, hungover, alone in the basement, with the Ouija board feet away from me, has left a scarring imprint on my psyche. I would spend the next morning reading the “dos and don’ts” of spirit contact, where I highlighted every violation we flagrantly committed. Clearly written across every screen were the exact same words, “you MUST close out the session and say goodbye.” I thought back, trying to navigate the fog of my memory to an exact point at which we would finalize our discussion. But there was none. We had made a cataclysmic error, but it was too late for panic. I was afraid, but what was done was done, and whatever is to happen, will happen.