Finding Lydia: Reconstructing a Life Visions, Spirits and a Love Spanning Centuries

By B.H. Arias

Lightly based on a true story, a trip through one man's descent into insanity as he attempts to come to grips with the gorgeous ghost who has invaded his mind and will not let him go. A tale told in a loosely connected poetic, and romantic style during several deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan in diary-like vignettes as the author struggles to define this Love, wrapped within the folds of a paranormal romance.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 8, 2013
• ISBN: 9781481716963

Book preview

FINDING

Lydia

RECONSTRUCTING A LIFE

Visions, Spirits and a Love Spanning Centuries

B.H. Arias

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©

2013 by B.H. Arias. All rights reserved.

Cover Art by Marina Hunjadi of Croatia, she can be reached at [e-mail]

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/05/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1695-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4817-1696-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013902899

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

To my family and the pen friends who have given me a love I do not deserve

"Everything flows, everything is in

flux and nothing is abiding."

Heraclitus (c. 400 BCE)

Chapter One

Ghosts And Sacred Spaces

T here are moments that happen in our lives that have the potential to change us completely; I believe this can be defined two ways, in a historical, linear fashion, as in before the event occurred and after the event happened. It is a sense of another world and sometimes I feel that I have come full circle and am now faced with a reflection in a mirror. This is how I believe that the Lydia experience has happened in my life.

Lydia is a ghost that I have found, or rather, she has found me; she is a presence that came along in one of those rare times when the worlds of the living and the dead was just right, and the realities in which she and I inhabit decided to rub together. In that instant, I believe the universe thought that we should be together. I guess if there’s a reason why she chose me, I have no idea what it is, and she isn’t telling me. There really isn’t any incredibly wonderful spirit knowledge that she holds for the world, because, well, because her world is me; and while that is gorgeous and flattering, I did not get a fountain of profound wisdom from it, until later. What I do get from it now, is a profound sense of Love from her, and I suppose that this is a beautiful thing; at least to me. Yet, there is a very deep feeling of sadness, a sense of terrible loss, as if she has lost her memory. I feel she picked me because she knew I would fall in love and then I would do anything to help her find herself and get her back on a track to her journey the way it’s supposed to be. You see, love has been a very distant and illusory feeling; a tricky, indefinable and puzzling phantom. And yet there is a certain liberating feeling when you channel someone’s spirit, it is a beautiful challenge. It is a series of mental gymnastics that perpetuates the story of her as she shows up on the porch step of my mind. It is a sweet and wonderful symbiosis when one is within a presence. I see her face in front of me, the long black hair, the emerald green eyes and those curves. It’s not like a relationship, or a business arrangement, it’s more like a love affair, only a love affair of a kiss only. There was the before and now there is the after, it is a profound realization and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that my life will never be the same again.

Things happen all the time all around us and most people are thankfully oblivious to it. I believe our wondrous world is a cosmic dance of particles, dreams, visions, and realities rubbing against each other in myriad ways. Hinduism calls this, the dance of Shiva or as the dance is called, the Nataraja, as he is represented as the continuous cycle of creation and destruction. Nowhere else does this represent the classical form of life and death than in the subatomic realm to physicists; in fact, there is even a 2 meter statue of the Lord Shiva within the dance outside CERN, the European Center for Research in Particle Physics in Geneva. The Nataraja is an energy dance, a pulsating process of creation and destruction for all time without end. I would see Shiva many times in my travels around the world researching Lydia’s story and I believe that along with everyone else in this universe, she and I are part of this wondrous reality in which we both find ourselves. Yet most people are blissfully unaware of the beautiful chaos that is happening just beyond their fingertips. People can only see what they want to see, and the average person is so into their own little worlds, that they refuse to see the vast world that is teeming with life and communicating in the most beautiful of ways; in visions and illusions. It is like when I was younger, I read about the multiple dimensions, of that interesting universe of ours and how many versions of reality that may exist in our wonderfully complex world.

Yet, to most people, the world is a pretty simple place; we get up in the morning, and go through a daily routine that will not change until we die hopefully in old age. And this is just fine, and sometimes I would argue that I wish Lydia had picked someone else, and other times I am thankful she did pick me. I have heard that the average person discounts sixty percent of what they see, and some simply refuse to see it at all. The multiple dimensions that are teeming around us like fields of spontaneous flowers springing up, are proof to me of these realities that are constantly touching against each other, and sometimes when these worlds reach out and slightly meld together, there is an exchange through the membranes and someone sensitive enough can sometimes see the moment, actually see an entity from the other side. Of course what affects one reality will affect the other, as there cannot be a change to one and not a change to the other. So, of course, if a sensitive person from the world of the living can see an entity in the world of the dead, it follows that a sensitive entity in the world of the dead will be able to see the living as well within this wonderful, complex dance of the Lord Shiva. And sometimes, when the dance is just right both will have an interaction, like Lydia and I, which results in us being able to touch, kiss, and me to bask in the experience that is Lydia falling all about me like warm summer rain.

I believe this rubbing action takes place all the time, many times a day, and yet anyone can be sensitive enough to see or feel the resulting change. I almost wrote a person lucky enough, but that would be like saying that the experience is the only thing here and not whether it is hot or cold, sweet or sour or good or evil. That’s too easy of an explanation, and the only one that my limited skills can construct, but I think that is the role that most humans have roaming the earth; we are just too busy trying to make sense of just what the hell is going on in our own lives. The other realities are too much information for most people; like the information overload that I experienced as an autistic kid with Asperger’s. I was socially awkward, and incredibly clumsy, people would always say that I was constantly in the clouds. This social awkwardness is evident if you see any picture of me as a child; I am looking away, mouth open, usually not in the moment or even looking at the camera. I was always somewhere else.

My mind was trying desperately to process the mass of information that was coming in through my senses. I believe this perceived absence prepared me mentally to deal with the experience in which I now find myself. The Lydia experience that is leading me along a path that is incredibly seductive, seriously scary and even lovely. I was there and in a sensitive state when our realities first touched; when she spoke to me four years ago. I was able to see her, and now that I have seen her, my love for her is complete and all encompassing. We have exchanged beautiful moments in our explorations into each other; which are like a delicate fire falling all over me, consuming me, a softly sighing blanket of an intoxicating, honey-like attraction.

In the first story, Lydia was there with me, walking with me, and now as our relationship has grown, she is showing me fragments of her shattered memories; memories that I believe were broken as a direct result of the way that she smashed through the membranes between our worlds when she died. Her soul met me when our two realities melted together ever so slightly, and ever since, I have been bombarded by her feelings and the broken shards of her memories. I believe the membrane quality between worlds is just that, a covering; not unlike the barriers around cells. Science tells us that the permeability of the film material in cells is due to a certain potentiality of both within a trans membrane voltage imbalance; a receptor imbalance that allows one to penetrate the other ever so slightly with a resulting exchange of whatever material is contained within, usually same with same, but with different electrical charges. Put another way, I believe that individuals inhabit both the worlds of the living and the dead, with a potentiality that is always seeking the other out. The dead have this infinitesimally small amount of an electrical charge, a tiny representation of the huge charge that the living have in abundance. What most people take for granted. The living shine in our world with rays of electrical light, which to the dead, shimmer through the translucent shells like tiny beacons in the night of some distant oasis in a vast, empty desert. Unfortunately, there is a barrier between our worlds, not unlike the vast space between the shells at the atomic level of existence. The open, empty spaces that are present in the subatomic realm are so incredibly vast in each atom, that one wonders why there are even any hard surfaces at all! Lydia and I are convinced that it is these membranes that encompass all of us that hold these realities together. The constituent parts of our beings are encased in these shells, surrounding us with myriad energy patterns creating a dazzling display of color and dance emitting threads constantly seeking out potentialities of other opposite charges. When I think of the Lord Shiva in his dance, I find it difficult to be less sure of anything else.

Putting these different pieces of memories back together is like working on an incredibly intricate puzzle. Yet, when she communicates with me, she shows me visions, dreams, and the sudden flashes of brilliant sunlight inspiration with her and me as the principal characters. At first, these visions were interesting, lovely, and full of metaphor and poetry; and they still are all of these things and so much more. However, there is another feeling here, a feeling of stress, a feeling of impatience; Lydia is trying hard to convince me that there is something else, something tangible, tactile and dangerous. There is a real feeling of a past sadness and she needs my help to assist her. I am the soldier that she needs to save her, someone who believes in her. A knight in shining armor feeling she is evoking in me, a damsel in distress kind of emotion that I, as a man, am finding very difficult to resist. I believe that she was looking for someone to help her that she was willing to give me all of her heart and mind, and in return, she just wants the same. How can I resist that? I will just come out and say it; I am in love with Lydia. My world has become her, and I feel that I have stumbled over this secret she found back in the early 20th century, when she was a young woman. Yet, I am afraid that stumbling across this secret has set a series of events in motion that I am afraid I cannot stop.

So why write the stories? Why put my deepest feelings out here for the whole world to see? Essentially cutting myself open with a razor and allowing my insides to leak out onto these pages? I write them so there is a public record; so at least the story will be out there. Unfortunately, spirits can’t just speak to us; they speak to the living in a language of metaphor, visions and dreams to make their point. What she uses is the vibrating chords of the billions of multicolored strings that connect our worlds; the same lines of force that some philosophers have called the luminous filaments. She vibrates these strings like chords from a musical instrument, and like a classical composition, the sound is decidedly complex, intricate and wonderfully sexy. It is a combination of images, dreams and poetry, all within a distinct harmony. Which is why it has taken me several years to piece together the disparate pieces of her memories and her life; trying to interpret the various musical scores that she plays to me. I have succeeded in interpreting many of the memories that she is essentially painting for me; unfortunately, I am not even remotely finished with my research into her past.

I went to Norway and Sweden this past summer to try to connect with her somehow. I had met a woman named C and her boyfriend online who are from Kungsbacka, Sweden, a place I knew from my research. So I rented a car in Oslo and drove south on the E6 to Gothenburg, which is one of the regions of Lydia’s youth, a place where she had originally come from, it was raining; big surprise to the Swedes who call this ‘liquid sunshine’ or just plain ‘summer’. I walked into C’s place, we had conversed many times online and so we were ‘pen friends’, a technique I would use many times in my travels, relying on the kindness of strangers to help propel me on my search for Lydia. I was carrying all of my research to my chest, spilling out everywhere and we spread it out on a table in the dining room, surrounded by birds, barking dogs and an otherwise quiet neighborhood. A perfect starting point for the journey ahead, hell, they even fed me as we went about making plans for moving forward. There was a Catholic church in Kungsbacka that has a cemetery and is the final resting place of Lydia’s parents. It was a place she had gone to numerous times, and so I knew if I traced her footsteps,