Three

All my life, it has always been three. Everywhere I turn, I see threes. Three people in front of me in line for coffee at the café. Three cents back for my coffee. I look up at the clock at promptly 3:33 every day. I’ve had three heartbreaks in my life, though I probably could’ve avoided the last one. I even live at 33 Trinity Street.

Perhaps I should give some back story here. It wasn’t really all my life. It all started when my irrational mother, for all intents and purposes, took me to our “psychic” neighbor as a baby. Claiming she needed to make sure that my fate was fixed, to her credit, she had been tormented by nightmares when she was pregnant with me.

I searched for this psychic when I grew up, and I was never able to track her down, which is lucky for her because who in their right mind tells a new mother this for a prophecy:

Before her third turn on the sun, she will brush with death. Upon her thirty-third, she will leave this world.

I didn’t find out till I was older that she later checked into a mental facility shortly after this trip, leaving me in the care of an aunt because my father just couldn’t cope with even looking at me. My aunt described my mother’s state as nonsensical, haunted, and inconsolable. Of course, being an only child growing up with my two siblings, I couldn’t help but notice that now I was indeed one of three.

As a child, I made a game of it, I said it was my favorite number, and I didn’t see much harm in it. As I grew older, it felt like a haunting ghost that wouldn’t leave my side. Like the echo mistakes I never made or a choice I never signed up for. But in my most desperate moments, when I felt on the brink of breaking, I also held fast to the three’s; the assurance of them grounded me in the reality that I was still alive, at least for now.

The friends that I trusted enough to tell would tell me that it was just the confirmation bias that caused me to see them everywhere. But they didn’t know the truth; they didn’t know that it wasn’t until I was thirty years of age that my aunt allowed me to read my father’s journals. It wasn’t until I was thirty that I learned my mother had taken me to the neighbors on that Wednesday in March so long ago. As I sat in my aunt’s house reading the journals of my father’s frantic script, I realized why she had felt the need to go.

“I pleaded with her not to repeat the mistakes of her own mothers before her, not to bestow a mantle onto our child. But she said it was the will of the three.” I could hear his voice as I read his words, stained with tears.

The will of the three.

I searched high and low for some record of this, some other mention in either my father’s journals or my mother’s, but there was none. I even switched jobs, becoming the curator at a local museum to see if they had any record of the mysterious three in their archives.

I never found anything.

My mother died soon after she went into the mental hospital. She left quite detailed instructions on where she wanted to be buried, but because I was so young, I didn’t visit her until I was older. I didn’t end up getting the courage until after I read the journals. When I found her grave, three rows and three stones in, I fell to my knees at the inscription.

Loved Mother, Loved Daughter, Loved Friend.

|||

A totally normal inscription to anyone else, if you ignore the three scratch marks below. Clearly made by someone else, not engraved into the stone. Three clear lines.

I am sure by now you are waiting to hear if the prophecy came to pass, to see if I lived to see my 34th birthday. But perhaps I need to remind you that the “prophecy” was that I would leave this world.

It was a normal day, well, normal from my standards. I saw the same number of instances of threes I would on any other morning, except on this morning, I awoke to a piece of paper left on the pillow next to my head.

Happy Birthday

- M

I didn’t have the heart to tell Matt that I wouldn’t be long for this world. So, we had spent one last wonderful night together, shared a meal and a drink, and fallen asleep tangled in the sheets. As always, at 3:33 am, I’d awoken to take in one last look at him.

As I walked to work, I took in a sharp inhale at each instance of three. Wondering if this would be the last one that I saw. Still, I got my coffee after waiting for the three people who stood in front of me, and I scooped up my three cents. I even let three people cut me off on the sidewalk as they walked arm-in-arm.

I arrived promptly at 9:33 at the museum on 3rd street, swinging open the middle of the three doors. But as I crossed the threshold, I was stunned to see not the lobby and the usual guard waiting for me on the other side.

Instead, two women veiled stood stoically across a long room, three enormous pillars rising up behind them on a dais. In the distance, the expanse of starlight seemed to stretch out for miles.

“Ahhh,” one of them sighed with relief, stepping toward her, one hand outstretched. The other hand seemed to be resting on a loom of some sort.

My heart rate increased rapidly as I scrambled backwards towards the door, a hesitant step back, only to realize the door I’d just come through had disappeared.

“Morrigan, you certainly kept us waiting.” The other woman said, pulling back her veil. Next to her on a pedestal sat what looked like a large pair of golden kitchen shears.

Morrigan.

I sucked in a sharp breath. How did she know my name? I dug my nails into my hand as memories of all the instances of threes began to rush to the surface. This woman, she was the barista at the coffee shop, she was the woman who cut me off in the street. The other woman unveiled herself now, and a memory of my neighbor came to the surface; she was her as well. How was it that she could be all those people?

She took another step toward me, and my heart stopped. "Morrigan?"

The way they said my name just then, I hadn’t heard it said with such love since—since her mother had last held me when I was just a baby. Honestly, I couldn’t even remember if that was just a memory that I’d made up or if it was real, but in this moment, it felt so real.

All the fear I had when I first stepped through the doors moments ago seemed to dissipate as I looked at their waiting hands. All the doubt I had all my life about the instances of threes and the prophecy that would come to pass. About leaving my life, and what my life would be.

As I stepped forward to join these two women. That's when I realized my mother hadn’t wanted to know that my life would be secure with her and my father on earth. She’d wanted to see if I would be called to join the three, because she never had been. Had it been a fate she'd escaped or wanted, I guess I would never know.

I took hold of the thread that spread between them, and a warmth rushed up to meet my touch as my fingers brushed the gold fibers. It felt right. It was a feeling I'd never had in my whole life back at home. The words rushed up to my lips before I could stop them.

“Let us begin.”