Almost six months after mourning.

This spring, my high-school drama teacher, a surrogate father for some of his students and a friend and inspiration to me, died of a heart attack. We’ll call him Tim, because if I called him Timothy Marie, you wouldn’t get the joke.

Last week, I was visited by Tim.

Disclaimer: I’m not a superstitious man; I don’t believe this was a visitation by anything but my subconscious. Nevertheless…

I’d been having trouble sleeping, despite trying to wake up by 8 each morning. This was around when I posted the Chinese Democracy post, which I finished at 6:30 a.m. after pulling myself out of bed at 3 a.m., never having actually slept. Other nights were much the same, with me hopping into bed early and hopping back out an hour later. This was also when I was reaching crunch time for finding a job — two weeks until the end of the month, probably two weeks before I could get paid, and judging by the lack of replies, Safeway was prominent in my future. This night, I think I’d been drifting between exhaustion, hyperactivity, and self-loathing in my bed for an hour.

For some reason, I thought of Tim, and I heard his voice in my head.

I’d spent enough time around Tim that I could imagine him saying about anything — most of my friends and I spent lunch in the drama room — so I assumed I was just putting words into his mouth. But I was curious, so I tried to turn off my brain.

His voice started to sound echoed, with only a moment’s delay; the source was distant and indistinct, and the echo was like a subtitle. The subtitles were perfectly clear, and my conscious brain — the part that was trying to find patterns or make sense of this — was only involved in the subtitles. The original was coming from somewhere else.

I don’t remember what Tim said, and it’s possible that I’m jumbling up even the pieces that stuck in my head. I remember the word “job”; I remember that he was stern; I remember feeling supported.

My best guess is that my conscious brain was drowsy and silent, letting my subconscious through, so there wasn’t any supernatural significance to this. I don’t know if this was the night before I woke up at 8 a.m. and got myself a job, so there’s dubious fiscal significance.

No matter what, for a little while, Tim was the voice of my conscience; I can’t decide whether I’ve been honored or if I was honoring him.