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  Who Am I

  Prequel to the Semiramis series

  Maya Daniels

  who am I. Copyright © 2017 by Maya Daniels. All rights reserved.

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  Cover design by Cover of Darkness, Logan Keys

  Interior design by Maya Daniels

  Edited by Angela Haworth

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Also by Maya Daniels

  1

  Do you know how many times I have sat alone in the darkness of a room not even realizing that the sun has gone down, and I need to turn the light on, while thinking about who I am? Or even more specifically, what I am and why was I given this life that seems to be doing everything in its power to make me suffer? If you wonder why, have a seat, grab a box of tissues if you are an emotional wreck like me, and let me tell you a story about a girl that wished she were never born.

  People call them “gifts” when you are born with some ability different than what’s considered normal in this fucked up world, but I beg to differ. Anyway, I have had a few of those ever since the day I took my first breath and up to this day, I wish was also my last too. I don’t mean to be a downer, it is what it is, you know. We are given many choices in a lifetime, but not the choice if we like to be a freak of nature or not. Nope, that’s something decided on our behalf long before we release that first scream coming out of the womb. We just learn to suck it up with time.

  So, as I said, I am one of those with the “gift”. From an early age, I learned a few things very fast. One. No one likes to be told when you see and hear things they don’t understand. They’ll tell you to shut up or laugh it off, but you’ll feel their fear and judgment, especially if you are an empath, which in my basket was added as, I thank you sucker, part of the gifts department. Two. Being an empath, you have compassion and love for everything, but just so the Goddess can make it more interesting for you, you’ll have the most empathy and compassion towards those who will hurt, betray, and belittle you. Three. Not even the one that gives you life will want to deal with the freak of nature you are. Ok, maybe this is not the case one hundred percent, but after so many years, I’m yet to meet one that had it differently, so I’ll go with this statement.

  I was an only child (oh will the miracles cease to exist, right?!). I don’t remember my father. I was told he used to visit me when I was born but shortly after that he left and never returned. I chased him away because I was crying nonstop and he couldn’t handle that. That was the answer every time I asked so I stopped asking. My own mother was too busy denying me being different, and too busy worrying whether she looked pretty enough, always chasing a different diet or a hairdo. If I cried she would scream in my face that I look too much like him and storm off. Who cares about a little creature that sees the world in you, huh? I still remember the times when I was pushed away and all I wanted was a hug, felt invisible when all I wanted was to be seen. Clutching my teddy bear for comfort, lip quivering but knowing better than to cry. Crying only made things worse. Worse, always worse. It gets better after a while because you kinda learn to entertain yourself, especially if you can manipulate water. Imagine my surprise when out of thin air, curled up in my room pretending to be invisible, I made this pretty little bubble. My mistake? I thought she would love me more because I could make them for her. They looked so pretty, I could change the shapes into anything I wanted and they appeared out of thin air. I was so excited thinking of the way she would smile and hug me…finally accept me, I guess. I was wrong. Expectations are a real killer. When not met they hurt more than any words or actions by others. The worse thing is, we do it to ourselves. Like gluttons for punishment we keep expecting, hoping, imagining. Maybe we learn later on in life to not expect anything but I doubt it. There is always that damn hope that gets us all. This was the first pivotal point in my life, my first trial.

  I was called a freak, a monster, and to never do that again. Up until this day I still see her horrified look when I close my eyes. I was dragged to doctors, priests, and old ladies up in the mountains. Anything, just so they could make the devil that possessed me let me be normal. That was scarier than me thinking I’m not good enough and that’s why she doesn’t love me. I remember the times I’d be kneeling on my bony little knees in front of priests while they would pray or spray me with holy water, smoke me with thyme until it felt like I’d cough my lungs out while tears ran down my face. “It is working,” they would say. I’d shiver from fear when they’d yell for the demon to be gone. I too wanted it gone, but I didn’t know where it was. I couldn’t understand what was happening, but I did want her to love me, so I shivered and shook, and listened to all they said. I prayed their prayers, asked forgiveness from their God for the evil inside me. I wondered if maybe the hole in my chest that I always felt was it. “Will it go away now?” I wished it would. Maybe now she’d love me. I hoped she would. There is that hope again. We are our worst tormentors. That never changes.

  Well, the demon didn’t show its face, nor did it leave. The hole in my chest that even physically hurt was still there. I stopped praying, even at that age it didn’t feel right somehow. It sounded like hollow words, nothing more. I learned to keep my mouth shut about anything that seemed out of the ordinary. I was a normal child for all intents and purposes. I still made my little bubbles, but only late at night when everyone was asleep. It was the only time I smiled.

  Days passed slowly at first, and the only times I could honestly say I felt like I existed, that I’m not a ghost, was the days when my grandmother visited. Oh, how I cherished those days. They felt like seeing sunshine after months of darkness. We didn’t visit her often, maybe twice that I can remember, but she always made sure to come and see me when she could. I made a mistake of telling her once how grateful I am that she loves me when I am not lovable and normal. They argued that weekend a lot, while I spent it crying, curled up in a ball in my room. Oh, how I wished I hadn’t said a word, but it was a little too late for that. I learned to never do that again, believe me. Listening to them was ripping my soul to tiny shreds in my little body, and that was the time when I started feeling the world would be a better place if I was never born into it.

  Before my grandmother left, she took me for a walk in the park. I was five years old but still remember it like it was yesterday. We walked amongst trees and watched the other children play on the swings, but I didn’t want to play. I just wanted to sit with her and hold her hand. I wasn’t invisible when she did that and I didn’t want to lose a second of it. She gave me a book that day. The Little Prince. I still have that book. It’s the most valuable thing I own. I cried for a week when I was alone in my room after she left.

  The next five years passed slowly with little rays of sunshine every time I saw her or spent time with her. When she was gone, I was dragged around to places where my mother wanted to go, but was left to wait in the car, sometimes for hours on end. I truly believed she was ashamed of my freak of nature existence, and I didn’t blame her. I didn’t love me either. The days were not that bad. I could look around through the car window at people, cars, or just at the sky and daydream about a lifetime in which I was a normal girl and my mother loved me, always smiling and hugging me instead of looking at me with wariness like she was afraid of me or like I was a pebble in her shoe. The nights were worse. I didn’t like those but kept quiet and never complained. It wasn’t bad if I managed to fall asleep in the back seat of the car while she was spending time dancing with her friends. It was bad when I couldn’t fall asleep. It felt like the shadows from all around the car were closing in and trying to corner me so I couldn’t escape. They felt like they were gripping my heart in a metal vice and squeezing until I felt it would stop. I used to sing a song my grandmother taught me, but at those t
imes I always forgot even the simplest lyrics I could usually remember so I’d just hum it, pretending she was there singing it for me. At those times, I never dared to make my little water bubbles just in case she came out of whatever place she was in to check on me. I would get in a lot of trouble otherwise and I assure you, having your bottom or the back of your thighs slapped with a wooden spoon is not fun. You can’t sit for days it hurts so much. So, I hummed until I eventually fell asleep.

  School was not much better if you are wondering about that. I was different; they were normal. I wanted to make friends. I did my best to be nice. They didn’t like me, regardless. Well, if I am honest, they had a few reasons not to like me. Looking back, I think not being accepted at home made me rebel against any type of authority, for one. Feeling unwanted, afraid, and not good enough made me stand up and go face to face with bullies to protect those that would cower from them. I used to see myself in each and every single one of the bullied children. So, I might have punched or kicked few bullies. I wasn’t proud of it then, I shouldn’t be proud of it now either, but…oh well. I still think they deserved it. And I took it upon myself to protect others.

  Parent-teacher meetings never went well for me, as you can imagine. I got close and personal with that bloody spoon more often than I would’ve liked, but I still think it was worth it. Me - one, bullies - zero. I liked to keep that score up. And I did!

  In the meantime, I was reading books like they were going out of style. Anything I could get my hands on, including instruction pamphlets. Pathetic, I know, but I just love to read. What can I say? My grandmother would suggest books, and I would devour them in two or maximum three days, no matter how big they were. I wouldn’t sleep until I finished it. She even gave me a little clip on light for my birthday so I wouldn’t get in trouble for reading late if my mother saw me. I used to hug the little light when I felt lonely, imagining I’m hugging her. So, every night I’d dive under my blankets, lift my knees so I could prop my book on them, clip the light on, and I was transported to a different world. Staying in those worlds was my deepest desire. To be somewhere else…anywhere else but here I thought. That’s why I love the night more than the day, even now, many years later. It’s so quiet! If you sit still enough you can hear the earth breathing, evolving. At times, I felt I could hear it move in the orbit too if I had the window open and the wind rustled the trees. The air at night is different too. It’s alive. I hear it whisper and tell me stories which I never repeated to anyone. I was weird enough without it, I didn’t need more help.

  As miserable as you may think my existence was, do me a favor and find something to be grateful for because, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, when it feels like things are bad, they can always get worse. Yup! You guessed it. They did get worse for me. For an entire year between the age of nine and ten, my mother decided it was time for me to get used to the cruelty of the world. So, apart from the wooden spoon lessons, I started receiving verbal ones too. I’ll spare you the details, but on the bright side, I learned a lot of new words. Derogatory, obviously, but words nonetheless. At first, I didn’t understand what some of them meant but I learned. I became obsessed with words. My grandmother always said: “Words have power, think twice, speak once.”

  I don’t believe my mother had gotten that lesson because it didn’t feel like she was thinking at all, little less twice. So, I stayed quiet, but I remembered every word. They hurt, but they hurt less than the spoon so at the time, I thought I was getting the better end of the deal. Now I know different. With every word spoken, a tiny piece of me was disappearing and the hole in my chest was getting bigger, wider. I would have taken a beating twice a day just to never have heard any of it. As with everything, it is what it is. You get the hand you’ve been dealt and you have two options. Bitch about it until your last breath, or, pick the cards up and see how well you can bluff if it’s a shitty hand like mine was. So, I bluffed! I learned when to cry and when to keep my mouth shut. I learned when to answer when she asked a question and when it was better to just be mute. I learned to keep a smile on my face even when I was screaming inside for help that never seemed to come. I just never learned how to not punch a bully at school. Even when she listened to my first principal and transferred me to a school for gifted children, ones with high IQ’s, things didn’t get any better. Nope, even with a higher than average IQ, a bully is a bully. And, I would punch him or her too. I always said the same thing to them after I punched them, which made little sense then, but it makes a lot of sense now.

  “Bullying is not allowed. Not on my watch.”

  I want to laugh now at how true that turned out to be. Grandma always said that most of the time, Spirit takes over and speaks through me. I’m starting to believe that now.

  After a year of learning new, not so pretty words, and sitting more on my hip than my butt from the lines the wooden spoon left on it, my second trial came to pass. I got home after school, and I had few hours alone before my mother came home from work. The little joys in life! I made dinner as usual, so we could eat when she came home, and started to set up the table. I realized that I still had one hour left so I picked up the book I was reading about the Druid ways and practices when I heard the door open. I had to hide the book! Grandma had said not to let my mother see it no matter what. Only problem? It was a huge, heavy book and I couldn’t take it in my room without passing her in the hallway. So, I did the only thing I could think of and shoved it under the sofa.

  It seemed like a smart idea at the time to a ten-year-old, that’s the only thing I can say. It was half-way through dinner when she got upset that I had forgotten to place more napkins on the table and stood up to grab them. I tried to beat her to it, but I wasn’t fast enough. As she stood up, she looked straight at the sofa and narrowed her eyes. I turned my head slowly and froze because even from where I was sitting, I could still see the huge book peeking from under it. She stormed there and pulled it out. I started explaining that it’s from the library for a project, which she obviously didn’t buy for a second. She lifted the book over her shoulder and threw it at me. I curled up my arms over my head, but I didn’t need to. As I turned, the heavy book corner hit me right in the middle of my back on my spinal cord and I immediately stopped feeling my legs. I crumbled on the ground, unable to move, but at least I couldn’t feel pain either, so that was good, right? No actually, it wasn’t good. I didn’t know it, but neither did she because she kept yelling and even kicked my legs telling me to stand up. I couldn’t and I did tell her that. She lifted me up and I crumbled down again. I think she panicked. I wanted to believe it was because she cared and got scared. Who knows. She paled, looked at me horrified, grabbed her purse from the stand where she left it when she came home, and I heard the car after a few minutes. Down on the floor, I stared at the ceiling, thinking she really does care, she went to get help. Well…she didn’t. As a matter a fact, after that day, I didn’t see her for a long time. I still thought of her from time to time, but I tried not to, at least not until I was ready to forgive her.

  I was on the floor for many hours until I dragged myself half-way across the room where the phone was sitting, and I called my grandmother. I even told her that my mother left to get a doctor. Her voice sounded strange, but she said she would come by the morning. She did. I’ve never seen her so pale and angry. I thought it was because I didn’t hide the book and when I told her how sorry I was, she burst into tears. I hated myself for making her cry. I still couldn’t get up, but she picked me up and put me in the bath. Water! Ever since birth, I have had this strong conviction that I can live without anything, even air, as long as I had water. It feels like it’s a part of me. It is part of me. I know that with more certainty than my own name. After five minutes in the bath, my grandmother started chanting something under her breath, she always did that. I used to ask what she was saying, but she never answered, so eventually, I stopped asking. As she was chanting, I felt warmth encompass my body and the water around
me started swirling. Slowly like a million tiny little ants, the feeling came back from my toes all the way to the top of my head. And just like that, I could move again. She turned me around and touched the birthmark on my spine. It’s a very strange one because it looks like a tree. She just said it got darker in color but it was still good. She also said I am lucky while it’s still on my body. If it disappeared, I was to tell her immediately. I had no idea what that meant and I didn’t care, I could move and my mother could come back now. She didn’t, but grandma packed me up and took me to live with her.

  The best years of my life started then. I was spending every day reading books, learning about earth and the elements, about energy and manifestations, about herbs, spices and crystals, but most of all, I learned how to manipulate water and fire. I felt free. Grandma told me I was water elemental but fire was my second best. For now, she said, and I wondered what that meant but most of the time when I asked questions she would say not everything is meant to be known at once, things will be revealed when it’s the right time and I better not challenge the Fates. We used to do rituals and make plants grow from seed to seedling within hours, not days or weeks. I was spending days running around the linden street collecting the flowers so she could dry them for tea. Tea was very important in her house, and I took it very seriously. I did everything I could so she never felt that she couldn’t love me because I was not lovable enough and I was strange. She accepted my weirdness and she made it sound like I was special. I even believed it for a while. When I was around thirteen, a voice started talking to me, a husky woman’s voice that used to make me feel excited for whatever reason and shitless scared for another. If I was sad, it was trying to cheer me up, it was telling me I’m needed, loved, and important. I wanted to believe it with everything I was, but I knew better. I kept the voice secret. Afraid that if my grandmother knew, she wouldn’t want me here. I was doing very well hiding it until around fifteen when it started telling me things. Especially if I saw a cute boy. It would tell me that I was stronger and smarter. I could control whoever I wanted but I needed to grow up first. It was telling me things only grown women should know and I was so scared that I confessed everything to grandma. In the middle of my crying, I abruptly stopped because she was hugging me and laughing and thanking the Goddess. This confused me to a point, and I just stared. Didn’t she hear what I just said?