2002-03-11 - 8:11 p.m.
Warnings and Premonitions

(This is today's second entry; this morning's, "Birthday Girl", is here).

D'you ever get premonitions? I do, every now and again. They aren't the flashy kind of things people imagine when they hear the word premonition; there aren't any blurred images, or phantom noises, or any messages about the distant future. They're always immediate, and they're always tactile.

Yes, tactile. As in, a phantom physical sensation that serves as an immediate warning. Tonight's was creepy. I had been unpacking, and I had a pile of empty boxes on the floor. I decided to carry them out for the recycling, so I found my brother's box knife and went to work. It's a very sharp knife; I nicked my finger near the beginning, and then set about being more careful. By the time I got to the last box, however, I was getting careless again.

I was sawing away at the last stretch of tape holding the bottom of the box together. My brains were clearly somewhere else, for I was bent over the box, with the blade in my direction, pulling towards myself as I sawed away. The knife was about ten inches from my throat.

Just as I neared the end, the right side of my neck began to sting, in a long, thin horizontal line across my jugular and larynx. I froze, and at that moment the last piece of tape parted. Had I still been sawing away, the force I was using would have jerked the knife up right where the phantom pain was; and given the sharpness of the blade ...

This sort of thing has happened to me before, a few times. Once, it saved me from a wreck. I was starting to cross a road just when an idiot along the side of that road pulled away from the curb, about a block and a half down, accelerating hard. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, but I had no way to gauge how fast he was going. He was still a short distance away when I felt a sudden wrench to my equilibrium, as if the entire car were being catapulted to the side, from a point of impact on the right rear corner of the car.

Obviously, I was still going straight across the road, impact-free. It unnerved me, so I panicked and pushed my own accelerator to the floor. I glanced up at the rear-view mirror a few seconds later as I reached the far side, and saw the other car pass less than a foot behind me. I shivered all the way home from that one.

Damn. It's been thirty minutes, and my throat is still tingling. It's creeping me out. *shudder*

I don't really believe that psychic phenomena, or ghosts, or magick, or etcetera are actually real... but enough strange things have happened to me in my lifetime that I can't firmly deny their existence, either.