To Ireland With My Sister and Someone Else?

My sister and I had a wonderful time in Ireland.  But, even being in the place I love most on this earth, I couldn't stop the flashes of images, the strong feelings, and the sense of remembering.  It seems I took them with me.

I wish I could explain it better.  It wasn’t déjà vu.  It was like I kept getting my wires crossed with someone else, and I would think, sense, and remember with their brain as well as my own.  My own brain never turned off, the other one simply activated.  I viewed it as a neurological problem.  When the short circuit at some neural synapse occurred, all of a sudden there was a hodgepodge of thoughts.  Some senses were being processed by the unfamiliar brain and the others by my own.  Confused does not even begin to describe the feeling.  The "two different brains" concept terrified me, and uninvited words sprouted from that little seed of doubt about my sanity.....schizophrenia and psychosis.   I had heard a joke during my Psychiatry rotation in nursing school...”Neurotics build castles in the sky.....Psychotics move in.”  Was I loading the van? 

I categorically refused to let anything spoil the trip.  I still had plenty of self-control, and I could refuse to acknowledge what was happening.  I did a fairly good job until one afternoon in a little shop in Clifden, Co. Galway.

I spied some attractive candles on a shelf and went to look at them.  They were scented.  I picked up a taupe candle with a scent called Volupte, and took a sniff.  I felt a strong, hot rush throughout my body, and thought, "Oh, my God, Rudy would love this!"  The absolute certainty of that thought rocked me back on my heels a bit.  It wasn't a passing little "oh this smells good.  I bet someone like Rudolph Valentino would have liked a scent like this."  No, it slammed into me like a truck.  I knew it beyond all doubt.

Okay, that shook me a bit.  I stood there smelling the candle and finally bought it. Only months later, did I ask my sister if she'd noticed anything odd about me when we were in that store.  She answered that she wondered what the hell was going on.  She'd never seen me get that agitated over a candle.  

For the rest of the trip, Rudy was foremost in my mind.  I kept getting distracted thinking about him.  There were times when I swear I felt him smile.  I got so angry with myself.  Why was I so damned obsessed with him?  I had managed to get through 58 years without going this far off the deep end.  Why now and most especially why him of all people?

When I returned from Ireland, I found the biography I'd ordered waiting for me, DARK LOVER, by Emily W. Leider.  Things were about to get really interesting.