Hidden Truths

“Papa? Who is that man over there?” I asked my papa. I have seen the man cloaked in shadows many times before. He’s always there, sometimes just ever so slightly out of sight. Sometimes he seems more vivid than normal. Even so, I’ve never asked his name. Maybe papa knows who he is. “Timothy?” Papa asked, talking about my uncle who has bright orange curly hair. “You know Timothy, Genevieve.” “No Papa! Not Timothy! I'm talking about the man leaning against the wall! The odd man wearing the cloak in the middle of summer!” “Sweetheart, I have no clue who you’re talking about. There is no man like that here and who in their right mind would wear a cloak in this heat?” “Kids and their imaginations.” My papa turned and started talking to the guys standing next to him. Ugh, figures no one ever believes the five-year-old. I looked back to where the man had been standing and he was no longer there, so abandoning my attempts at figuring out who he was, I ran off and played with my cousins and brother. It is Charles' birthday today. He turned four. So we played for hours before the man cloaked in shadow finally reappeared, this time though he looked a bit disheveled and worn out. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ A year after my mom went into the insane asylum, I stopped talking. I knew if I continued to talk about the shadow people I would end up just like her. She would often talk about seeing people that supposedly weren’t there and she was always the only one who ever actually believed me. They claimed she was schizophrenic and they thought I might be too, though they weren’t sure if I was just saying things for attention, since my mom said similar stuff or not. However, I was diagnosed with select mutism. My father recently started to drink heavily and would become quite volatile at times. He’d often take it out on me saying it was all my fault and that his wife was fine until I came along. It was then I found out I was adopted. So I looked into what might cause people to see beyond the veil or see other worlds because, by now, I was sure the shadow people were real, and even though they were becoming more prominent and more solid as years went on, I was sure they weren’t completely on this plane of existence. Turns out that my mom and I are likely Clairvoyant. The only true light I had in the chaos that became my life was my brother Charles. He’s a year younger than me and is also clairvoyant, but not as much as mom was. He’s more clairaudient rather than clairvoyant. He hears what I’m thinking, so we communicate by him talking and me thinking. He will sometimes mention stuff about hearing the shadow people as well, but says it's harder to make out what they say. He says he sometimes picks up words like princess, tribrid, school, power, and magic. Though he has no clue what any of it means. Sometimes I start writing stuff based on those words alone and I come up with so many different ideas about what they could be talking about in this other world. It’s one of the few things that keep me going. ~~~~~~~~~~ The day before my seventeenth birthday, I noticed the man in the cloak became antsy, he was on edge for some reason and he was trying to stay as close to me as possible. He had become almost completely Corporeal by now and I was sure if I reached out I would have been able to touch him. He had disappeared for a small portion of the day and looked kinda agitated when he finally came back. Eventually, it was late so I went to bed.