Voices
by Delores Peterson

I believe people can hear voices without being crazy or having to accept that it's their own inner voice they hear.

I heard a voice. It asked,  Do you want to meet him?  I was standing in front of a bathroom mirror washing a pair of stockings. No one else was home so the house was quiet except for the sloshing of water in the sink. I don't know that I heard it so much as heard the question almost type itself into my head.

Later, my mother told me that paranormal sensitivity is heightened near water.

At the time I thought and answered no. I thought by  him,  the voice meant death. And I didn't want to die. I thought that was the end of things, but I heard the voice and the question about five times in all.

The second time I started thinking that maybe I was being asked if I wanted to meet a man, someone real. Or the happier thought that I was going to meet five men, one for each question I heard.

I was in a troubled marriage. I started thinking after the voices that maybe the voice was trying to tell me that there was someone else waiting to come into my life. I did get divorced, and it's been 10 years since the voice, but I can't say I've met  him  yet.

My mother heard voices on a few occasions in her life.

Her older sister died at age 10 when my mother was 8. Shortly thereafter my mother was outside and heard her sister's voice ask,  Did you bring me flowers?  My mother was scared and never heard her sister's voice again.

When my mother was in her early thirties, she heard a different voice. She'd recently given birth to twin girls after giving birth to five daughters previously. She'd always wanted twins and had to wait until her sixth pregnancy to get them. The morning she found out that she was carrying twins, she made us scrambled eggs for breakfast and all the eggs came out double-yolked. But I digress. My mother heard the voice while nursing one of the twins with the other in a crib nearby. It said,  There. Are you happy now?

Over human history and through various cultures hearing voices has either been accepted or denounced. People were thought to run the gamut from being crazy or being a witch to being visited by heavenly beings. The tendency in our culture is to explain it rationally away.

I'm not crazy and I'm not a church-goer, but I do believe there's something beyond this earth, this physical universe. As Shakespeare said,  All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players.  I believe that there will be a time after the curtain goes down when we will be reunited with a higher spiritual realm. And that in the meantime, their voices speak to us on occasion from the life to come.