I'm psychic. I know I've told some of you about it already (but then, who knows who's reading this!), but I've never written it all out before. It's a little embarrassing sometimes. It's not that I can predict the future or watch people from a distance or anything like that, so I can't come up with the "proof" most people ask for (not that those people really want to believe it anyway). Since I was very young, like five or six, I've had this kind of second voice in my mind from time to time. Early on, I couldn't control it - it'd tend to happen when I got emotional about something, good or bad, and some observation about the situation would just pop into my head, but it never felt like me. For a long time I just tried to ignore it.

But the summer before high school, I had a lot of things going on in my life, and that other voice was oddly comforting, as if it knew I'd be fine. So I started to embrace it (I mean "her"). I made it more like a meditation. I try to relax, calm my thoughts, and imagine myself as a kind of doorway. Because the way in which I'm psychic is that I'm able to speak to a spirit guide. My guide's name is Blanche. I am what's known as a "clairaudient", which means I can hear her - it's not exactly like hearing, but that's the best way to describe it. She doesn't know the future any more than I do, but she can speak to other souls (though she says I'm the only living person she is in contact with), and she knows quite a bit about the past, and about me.

This hasn't always been easy for me to talk about, half the time I wonder if I'm suffering from some psychiatric disorder. Even as Blanche was helping me with my own life, I never really asked about hers - even though I wanted to - because I worried that, at the slightest pressure or sign of skepticism from me, the illusion would crumble. But a few weeks ago, I was on Louisiana around 4th, in Washington, when Blanche suddenly spoke to me (a little unusual in and of itself) and said that she'd once performed nearby, and that it was a shame the theater had been torn down. I looked through a few archival sources (work made this a lot easier), and found The American Theatre (only a reference to it) had once been right around there.

It wasn't much, but it really reaffirmed her existence for me, and she's felt more present than ever lately, so I decided it was time to ask Blanche a little about herself. Last night I shut myself in my room, dimmed the lights, did my breathing exercises, and conducted my "interview". Blanche suffered through unimaginable circumstances in her lifetime. It was very intense listening to her speak about all of this with a passion I had never heard from her before, and after a while I just couldn't go .. I broke the connection, Blanche said that she likes the idea of sharing her story with as many people as possible, so I have tried to put everything together into a few words that I hope will convey her story as well as she did:

It is around 1825 when Blanche (born "Anne") is born into a middle class family in Philadelphia (she refuses to be specific about any date that would confirm her age). Not genteel but aspiring to be, her father is an ambitious ship's captain, who is able to keep his family in comfortable circumstances; he sends Anne to the first female academy in Philadelphia, and makes sure that she is dressed fashionably so that she can attract a suitable mate. But a reversal of fortune in the 1840's compels the Captain to marry off the (approximately) fifteen-year old Anne to an older, debauched shipping merchant, who has been married twice before, both wives having died in childbirth; the daughters from these previous unions are older than Anne.

The merchant's income and social status should have kept her in the comfort that her prospects required but the merchant turns out to be an alcoholic who does not consistently pay his bills. When drunk, he becomes abusive, and afterwards mewls his apology, head cupped in his hands, pleading forgiveness. Their household is fraught with bickering over money and possessions, and at Anne's insistence, when the opportunity arises for him to make a killing in the spice trade in the East Indies, she urges him to sail off on one of his ships, and when she does not hear from him for the next three years, she assumes he is dead. Aiding and abetting this assumption is the fact that she has fallen in love, for the first time in her life, with a handsome but penniless young drifter, named Richard Beesgrove.

She has her husband declared legally dead and marries for a second time. Her father, whose prospects improved through his daughter's marriage to the merchant, is incensed. How can Anne sacrifice her status for a drifter? But Blanche is besotted; Beesgrove may be a loafer, but he is a virile one, and he is all hers. And just when she thinks everything is perfectly settled, a year after being declared legally dead, four years after his disappearance, the merchant returns to Philadelphia, threatening not only divorce but charges of bigamy – in other words, utter ruin. Before legal action is taken, Richard Beesgrove tracks down, shoots and kills the merchant. Beesgrove is promptly convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging, with Anne charged as an accessory. In jail, with no one to speak up for her – her father disowns her – everything seems lost, her love, her life – she prays for if not deliverance then reassurance, but nothing is revealed. What to do? When life has been spread before you like a trajectory leading ever-upwards, there is no easy explanation for not only failure but misery! – she'd never anticipated that. As the cavernous despair of the persecuted begins to enclose her, she searches for guidance.