Davis Between Realms: Prologue
An Early Reading By, Avonnashay Jah
This prologue introduces the frequency that governs Davis Between Realms.
(Future Davis)
People hear “realms” and imagine distance. Like separate countries. Like doors you open with the right key.
That is not how it is.
It is closer than that. Closer in the way a memory sits behind your teeth. Closer in the way a song returns when you did not invite it. The worlds overlap because they were never meant to be fully apart. Separation is something we maintain, the way you maintain a roof or a marriage. By attention. By repair. By refusing to let small fractures become a collapse.
There is the world you touch.
There is the world that remembers.
There is the world that listens.
There is the world that waits.
Most people live their entire lives inside the first one and call that enough.
But children do not arrive with the same filters adults depend on. They come into the world soft and wide open. They feel the temperature shift before they can name the weather. They hear the hum under language. They notice when a room is holding its breath.
Some children learn quickly how to close themselves. They learn because the world teaches them. Be quiet. Be normal. Ignore what you cannot explain. Smile through discomfort. Pretend the air is only air.
Other children do not learn that lesson. Not because they are stubborn. Because their bodies will not let them.
That was me.
When I was small, I did not know my hands were doing more than waving at nothing. I only knew that if I moved them a certain way, my chest loosened. The pressure in the room shifted. The noise behind the noise backed up a step. It felt like turning down a sound that had no knob.
Adults called it stimming.
Doctors wrote it down as a behavior.
My mother called it regulation and whispered prayer into my ear until the rhythm of my breath belonged to me again.
My father watched it like he watched wiring. He did not judge it. He studied it. He noticed that motion arrived before calm, and he trusted what repeated.
We moved to Bensalem when I was five.
To tell the truth, my parents were not running from anything. They were trying to build something. Lower costs, more space, better services, a school system that promised support instead of punishment. My father had family there. He planned to grow his electrical work until it became a business with a name on the side of the truck, something our family could lean on without shame.
They did what people are told to do when they love their child and want a quieter life.
They chose a neighborhood with trees.
That is the part no one warns you about. How the places that look peaceful sometimes have the deepest roots.
Between one and three in the morning, the world loosens its grip. The boundaries thin. It is not dramatic. It is not lightning. It is a soft change, like fabric stretching. Like a house settling into a new season.
That was when I woke.
Not every night. Most nights. And when I did, I listened the way other children listen for footsteps down the hall. The air was crowded with things adults had learned to call imagination. I heard voices that carried no throat. I felt attention that carried no body.
Some of what spoke to me was only memory. Echoes that did not know they were echoes.
Some of what spoke to me was lost and trying to be found.
And some of what pressed in was something else entirely, something that had learned how to use quiet as a disguise.
I did not open the doors. That matters.
If you want to understand this, remember how electricity behaves. It does not care what you believe. It follows laws until the laws are broken. And when the laws are broken, it does not become magic. It becomes dangerous.
My father understood that.
My mother understood something different. She understood that danger can be quiet and still be real.
I am telling you this now because by the time you reach the end of this story, you will want to decide what it was. A haunting. A gift. A disorder. A miracle.
It will tempt you to label it and set it down.
Do not set it down.
What happened in that house was not a single event. It was the beginning of a strain that had already been spreading. A symptom of a world that had forgotten how to hold itself together. A reminder that reverence is not decoration. It is structure.
If you hear this as myth, I will not argue with you. Myth is how truth survives when people refuse to face it directly.
But understand this.
The worlds are not collapsing.
They are converging.
And the question is not whether the doors will open.
The question is whether anyone will remember what keeps them from tearing.
