I managed to recover from my pain with just enough time to do late make-ups on my final exams and papers. There was a great deal of stress surrounding Yumi’s return to Japan, and the time that we would spend apart.
I was actually glad to see her go at first, so that I could get a break from all the insanity. I had crushed the rest of the pills and flushed them down the toilet, ready to be done with the whole affair.
I went home that winter, and my mother was continuing an ongoing campaign of hers to make me self-reliant. So, that meant that she and her boyfriend were going out to eat every night, and very little food was left in the house.
If I wanted anything to eat, I needed to pay for it myself. So, I had to ride my bike in the snow to pick up groceries and things. I made a special bike trip
through slush and snow to get some oranges, because I felt like I was really getting a terrible cold.
I was blowing my nose all the time, as an incredible amount of mucus seemed to be generated. Day after day, the results started to have greater amounts of clotted blood in them, until it was looking quite serious.
My nasal passages were literally raw with pain. Also, at the same time I started noticing that I had so little energy, I could hardly even stand up. Before too long, I was spending every day in the same position, sprawled out on the living-room couch.
Finally my mother realized that I needed to go to the doctor and figure out what was going on.
I had blood drawn, and was told a day or two later that I had the Epstein-Barr virus, Mononucleosis, or Mono, known as "the kissing disease."
I also found out that if you didn’t fully get rid of Mono when you first got it, it could lead to an even more serious and ongoing condition called "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome." I was literally so weak that I couldn’t get up from the couch without an extreme level of effort.
I certainly did not want to end up with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and asked my mother what to do about it. The doctors basically said that there was nothing they could give me; it simply had to run its course.
I had written a letter to Yumi that I never actually sent, which detailed a dream that I had at the time about my illness. In the dream, there were all these very long worms that kept coming at me from all directions in the midst of a dark forest.
The best thing I could do to stop these worms was to simply reach out and grab them as they got close, and throw them away from me. However, the worms were quite resilient, and it seemed that as soon as I threw them away, they would just come right back.
It was a pretty scary dream, and I knew as soon as I woke up that it was a diagnosis of my current health condition. The worms may well have
represented the viral infection that had worked its way through my body.
Thankfully, my mother was in touch with a holistic healer and chiropractor who had been practicing medicine for many years.
The doctor told my mother to immediately buy me the full range of vitamins and minerals as supplements, and to take two or three times the normal amounts. I started to do this, and in a seemingly miraculous amount of time I started to recover — much faster than what the doctors had originally told me.
I even amazed myself at my unusually speedy recovery.
I went back to New Paltz, eager to be back together with Yumi. Despite all the pain that we had been through together, there was still an attachment there, and not having Yumi around had only made me feel more alone.
I was glad to be in her "delightful" company yet again. I had basically
forgotten how terrible things had become there for a while. Again, the patterns
of my self-indulgence with addiction had holographically resurfaced in a different form.
Unfortunately, Yumi did not have such a warm reception for me. She had just been through the Japanese "Graduation" ceremony, which occurs on the
nineteenth birthday. This was an elaborate affair, where all the women dressed in 10,000-dollar kimonos that they might have been saving money to buy for all of their lives.
The Graduation ceremony gave Yumi a chance to see all of her old friends again, after a long absence. They not only went to the ceremony together, but they spent lots of time together on the outside, rekindling old friendships and romances and going out to dance clubs.
So, when Yumi came back, I felt as though I was sorely in need of
companionship. Yumi, on the other hand, felt sorely in need of being back in Japan! I took it as a personal insult that she didn’t seem to want to be around me, and she would whine and complain about how much she wanted to be back in Japan. It only intensified the struggle between us in the relationship.
Despite our constant carping at each other, Yumi did have something very interesting to reveal to me when she came back. I knew that Yumi’s family was rather wealthy for Japanese standards, living in a country-style suburb of the city of Gifu called Gifu-ken.
I knew that they were still actively practicing the Shinto religion, and regularly attended their local temples and observed Shintoist rituals and rites. One of these rites involved opening all the doors and windows of the house on a certain day of the year, leaving out food and drawing a hot bath.
It was believed that the ancestral spirits of the family would enter into the house, eat the food on the etheric level and take a bath on the etheric level.
No one else was to use the bath or the food, as it was only for the ancestors.
I knew well the heavy involvement that Yumi’s family had with the Shinto faith, as well as its practitioners. She had already told me the story about this
incredible female shaman-priestess that her parents would consult.
Apparently this person was very well known in the upper echelon Shintoist circles, and her psychic accuracy level was so high that in her old age, it had become quite expensive to get consultations with her. However, Yumi and her wealthy family had worked with this woman for many years, and over time they had grown into a very special, almost familial relationship with her.
Yumi had used an object with me when I got sick that the woman had given her. It was a paper-thin solid-gold circle wafer, about two and a half inches wide and laminated in plastic.
Slightly raised inside the circle was a perfect triangle, and it was formed from the straight, stylized geometric branches and central stalk of a tree. She told me that I should keep this object in my pocket, and it would help me to heal myself. I had no idea if it really had done anything, but I did have it on my person for several weeks.
According to Yumi, this woman had made hundreds and hundreds of
stunningly accurate predictions. She had already given me what appeared to
be a much more mundane example, which occurred when she went to the woman with her four different choices of prospective college campuses that she could take through her foreign-exchange classes.
The woman was very insistent that Yumi had to take New Paltz, New York over the other choices; this was the only proper decision that she could make. We had both speculated if part of the reason for this was that it would have brought us together, although it also satisfied Yumi’s wish of being close to New York City.
Yumi also told me that the woman had informed her that she could learn to be just as accurate a mystic as the woman herself was. Every time Yumi and I would have this conversation, I would tell her that she was crazy not to become this woman’s apprentice and to learn to do these things on her own.
But she was adamant in telling me that she was scared by the whole idea.
She was still very caught up in her big dreams of being an avant-garde hairstylist working in Paris with the world’s top fashion models. To her, this world of glamour meant everything, and now that she was in America and right near New York City, she was feeling it more than ever.
She also was spending about eighty dollars every three days and frequently traveling to New York on her own. I had absolutely no desire whatsoever to be in the city, and we never once went there together.
Yumi had snapped a torrent of photographs of us together, and they were all printed two-by-two, one set taped on my wall and one set in her purse. When she had gone back to Japan, she had visited with the woman and told her about me.
She explained to the woman a little about the work that I was involved with, my UFO research and what our relationship was like. She told the woman about how dedicated I was to reading these books, and how I felt that there was a massive spiritual reason for the existence of extraterrestrials in our skies.
Translated into English from Japanese, the conversation between Yumi and the woman apparently went like this:
Woman: You have picture of this man, yes?
Yumi: Yes, I have picture.
Woman: May I see picture of this man, please?
Yumi: Sure. [Fiddles around in her purse, grabs a photograph and hands it to the woman.]
Woman: This is him here? [Points to picture.]
Yumi: Yes.
Woman: [Concentrates for a moment, suddenly looks to Yumi with serious facial expression:] This man going to be very famous.
Yumi: [Surprised:] What do you mean, famous? I don’t understand.
Woman: [momentarily pausing:] Spiritual leader. This man going to be… very famous spiritual leader.
When Yumi told me all this I brushed it off and didn’t think anything of it at first. It was just another one of those bizarre synchronicities that had happened in my life, mirroring my sighting of the streaking meteorite.
Yumi seemed more enthusiastic about it than I was. And yet somehow, this psychic priestess had spoken a hidden thought of mine, something that I had always believed without ever really knowing why. I didn’t bother to spend time worrying or thinking about it, as there was no way for me to know if it would ever actually be true.
All I knew at that time was that I was completely fascinated by recording my dreams and conducting my research, and that was where my true passion was.
I wondered if I might be able to do something with it career-wise later in my life, but I was never quite sure. The words of the priestess did serve as an encouragement for me to continue my work.
In the meantime, my roommate Artie had decided to move off-campus for this semester. But, he didn’t want to lose his meal plan, so he "kept" the room, even though he was never there.
This meant that with no extra charge, I ended up with a "single" in what many people considered to be the "coolest dorm in New Paltz." So, I pushed the two beds together and Yumi and I both spent most of our time living and sleeping there with each other.
This produced an incredible parallel to the continuing increase of my usage of marijuana during those troubled years of my life. We ended up "Doing the F&F," or the "fight and fool around" routine, if you catch my drift.
Our co-dependency was so all-consuming that we were constantly around each other when we were not in class. And yet, on a fundamental level I wanted to break the cycle, so I could get back to my fastidious book-reading endeavors and spend more time with my other friends.