PRINCE'S HOUSE 7141 GALPIN BLVD, CHANHASSEN, MINNESOTA 12:43 AM
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Suddenly, for a split second, everything suddenly made sense.
It was that eerily ethereal connection between us that I tried so hard to deny. The way we'd been completing each other's sentences all day. It all made sense. While a piece of myself strongly questions if this was another one of his hypnotic schemes his first wife supposedly spoke of, the other half is failing to come up with a logical explanation about what is really happening here and how I am standing with a painting of my eye from a year ago. A year that is truly over thirty years ago and before I was born. I hardly made it to the part of the org where I'd know how normal this exchange may be considered.
I sit on Prince's bed, the small 8x10 sitting in my lap as my awestruck eyes are glued to the foreseeing canvas.
"I ain't crazy," Prince states. He stands in front of me with his hands anxiously tinkering with the skin of the other. "CJ..."
Besides the genuine shock of the multiple, and I use this word ever so lightly, coincidental moments of irony we have been experiencing all lining up, there is another state of shock on my agenda. I am the one who woke up in the wrong year and still he is taking all of this better than me... On the outside, at least. Even with his occasional frantic glances or screwed up eyebrows, his verbal play is still cool as a cucumber in comparison to the way I'm sweating bullets. Maybe it has something to do with him being in his home universe. Here we have yet another moment that not a single time travel film warned me of. At this point, I know without a doubt that I have screwed up a timeline somewhere. I'm probably the reason Rihanna won't be born. What the hell will we do now without Fenty Beauty?
The bed sinks down as Prince settles beside me. "It's fate," he says. "Some freaky, twisted up version of it but it's still fate. You don't belong here but he made sure you found your way to me. Where are you from?"
"California," I say.
His scoff is silent as his duck lips protrude in sync with the rolling of his eyes. His eyes return to my own, a cock of his brow as sass rules his tone. "Where are you really from?"
Immediately, I feel my nerves getting the best of me. Uncertainty builds a prison cell around my lungs. The constraint hinders my ability to answer the question honestly. In the moment of my paralysis, I can ask myself the most important questions. Do I want to tell him? Will he freak out more? What happens next?
Microscopic elves of artic temperatures sprint down my body, starting at the tip of my head and running down to my toes, as Prince gently retrieved the painting from my grasp. "You can be honest with me. Trust me." His index knuckle lifts my head by my chin as our eyes connect. In his eyes I see euphoria personified for the very first time. Just like that, I've got the same jones in my bones that left dozens of women slain.
