Editor’s note: the following piece, written by Eric Francis, was originally published on Oct. 21, 2005. Pieces like these are now only available via the archives, accessible with a Planet Waves Astrology News subscription. Part II will be published at 6 pm EST tomorrow. –RA
WHEN I WAS LIVING in Miami in 1999, often I would fall asleep playing an unmarked blue CD that was left behind by a friend named Ramona, one of many visitors to my momentary life there who dropped in from unusual places.
I lived alone right on the ocean in a little white-tiled hotel room with a big window that did not open. The room was cheap and it seemed to manifest effortlessly, like the space itself had invited me to come visit. It seemed to invite many other people as well.
The CD must have been from a musical genre called Trance. At the time, I did not follow electronic music, and I never looked into it, but playing it certainly put me into a kind of trance, and I found its sculpted sounds, its warm, complex rhythm and its narrated voice deeply reassuring in what were some of the more displaced days of my life. The music began from something close to silence, and then, gradually building on a rhythm, faded into existence. Then the rhythms and tones would develop and transpose until a kind of sonic dream had arisen.
Then, a man’s voice would speak like it was projected through a veil of water: Meet me on the other side.
I don’t remember how or where Ramona and I first encountered one another in the psychic ocean of the Internet, but her presence approached me with directness and invited a direct response. The next thing I knew, she was sitting with me in my small white room on the Atlantic. We spent one weekend together. I never heard from her again, and immediately after she left, her email address, our only form of contact, stopped working. There were times, after that weekend, that I wondered whether the experience had actually happened.