by Cheryl Barnette

Created on: January 16, 2010

Reading helped me develop all the marvelous journeys I embarked upon in my mind, but the burdensome thoughts of death besieged me. These same thoughts were persistent throughout my lifetime. I often sought out “beings” to communicate with, hoping to find an answer from an angel or even God. I soon became intuitive. I would be able to find lost objects with ease. I felt like a gifted child in that respect. I was able to read at a very young age and with such speed.

My father instilled a love of reading in his family. We all loved reading, but I seemed to be spell-bound by the written word and gobbled books daily. I even read the back of detergent bottles and toothpaste labels because the greater the syllable, the more empowered I felt.

I would often read to my younger siblings and I held “classes” in my bedroom to instruct them on the basics of elementary subjects. I even held classes on “Death and Dying.” I wanted my siblings to know love, and peace. I didn’t want them to be stifled by the fear of death, as I had been. I confronted this issue of death head-on as a child even, and was told time and time again not to hold onto it, as it was a subject reserved for God’s use only.

I read my Bible faithfully, and gathered together little prayers and affirmations. I kept the Bible beside me as if it were an inanimate lullaby, a holy comfort of soft armor. Locked inside this magical book, I was certain to find the answer for alcoholism, and I would share it with my parents, because they were afflicted. If I were to concentrate hard enough, maybe, just maybe, God would empower me to open to the correct page in the Bible, the one that I accidentally overlooked or even turned two pages at a time; these onion-skinned pages, thin but thick and ripe with serenity. Maybe I will stumble upon that verse that reveals to me how I can stop my parents from drinking so much. If they were to die, I should never recover. This was a lot for a young girl to handle but I had my guardians beside me.

I begged the blessed angels to visit me at night, to whisper in my ear that all will be well, to kiss my cheek lightly, as mom would do at night if she weren’t drinking too much, or even read a story to put me to sleep, like daddy used to do when he wasn’t drinking too much. And wouldn’t it be just divine, oh so divine, if many angels could visit all of my brothers and sisters, one by one, to let them each know that everything

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