Chapter Three: Operation Crayon Nostradamus
My first real test came in the form of Crayola and credibility. I’d relearned how to scribble, but now I had something to say. Using the only medium available to me—construction paper and crayons—I wrote a note in big, clumsy letters:
“SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER WILL BLOW UP IN 1986. 7 ASTRONAUTS DIE.”
I showed it to my mom, She laughed.
“What a big imagination you have!”
Then I showed it to my dad.
He studied the drawing for a long time, furrowing his brow at the big, blocky letters and the crude sketches.
I still lacked the fine motor skills to make my body obey.
It didn’t help that I’d never had much artistic talent, and even as an adult, my handwriting had been… atrocious.
Later, my dad took the drawing to show his mother. The two of them talked about it in hushed whispers. That Sunday, he took me to church—where my grandma led a prayer.
For me and I screamed inwardly, inside my head.
Not because I was mad at her, but because I realized something: I was powerless. I could remember dates. Disasters. Warnings. But no one would take a toddler seriously. Not even if I spelled out words no two-year-old should know. Not even if I wrote out the truth in crayon. It freaked everyone out. They didn’t take it as a warning—they saw it as something wrong with me. Something unnatural. Worst of all, the explosion wasn’t even close yet. It was still a full year away. No one was going to remember some scribbled warning from a toddler twelve months from now.
I had no credibility. No way to prove what I knew. No way to stop what was coming. I couldn’t save them. Not yet and that hit me harder than I ever expected.
So, I pivoted, I started small. Predictions I could make that didn’t sound insane. I told my mom the neighbor’s power would go out. It did.
When our new kitten was stolen, I immediately told my dad I’d seen the neighbor take her. I hadn’t, not really. But, I had remembered it took us a year to find out the truth the first time. By then, too much time had passed. The evidence was gone. My family didn’t want to fight over it. But this time, my dad went next door and told her that his son had seen her pick up the cat. An hour later, Binx was back in my arms. I cried, not just from the joy of having my kitten returned to me, but in reality It was the first real, meaningful change I’d made. It mattered more than I expected. Because having Binx back in my life made me feel a little less lonely.
One day, I said Grandma would call at exactly 3:17 and She did.
I said it would rain tomorrow—even though the sky was blue and the weatherman had promised sunshine. It rained.
That’s when my grandma started watching me differently. She wasn’t scared, she wasn’t suspicious. Just… careful. Like she was tuning in. Studying me. Curious.
Some days I swore she knew something. Or at least suspected.
She never said anything out loud, but there was something in the way her eyes lingered—like she was quietly cataloging everything I said.
She hadn’t figured out the truth. Not really. I think she just sensed it. That something had changed in me. That I was different.
Sometimes, I thought she saw me the way a person might look at a child prophet—wandering the house barefoot, making little predictions in between snack time and Sesame Street. And in her silence, I felt both comforted… and exposed.
Then, one day, while she was babysitting me, I caught her in bedroom—standing in the soft glow of morning light, holding something in her hands. It was the drawing. My drawing. The one with the crude letters:
“SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER WILL BLOW UP IN 1986. 7 ASTRONAUTS DIE.” She’d kept it. Folded, creased, but intact.
She didn’t see me watching from the doorway. She just stared at it for a long time, her thumb brushing over the edge of the paper like she was trying to feel the truth in it. Then she quietly slid it back into small shoe box and shut the lid. I had recognized that shoebox, she had kept it for years, would put anything I would collect or make in that box, I had changed that too. Because I never made that note before.
That moment never came up in conversation. She never asked me about it. Never called it out. But after that, she started calling me by my full name more often and when she hugged me, it lingered. Just a little longer than before. I never knew for sure what she believed. But I think—deep down—she believed something had happened to me or was happening. In the other life, she was always quick to notice whenever anything had changed or had become different.
I know my struggle with faith and religion is in part because I suffer from c-ptsd, but it’s also because when I was crying out for help. The Christian church let me down, instead of trying to dive deeper and getting me help, I got lectured, prayed to, prayed out, given quotes from the bible, or reasons and excuses about why my life is the way it is. Others felt the need to compare their lives, and problems to my own and tell me they know how I feel, or want to tell me everything Jesus went through before he died and tell me to suck it up.
J Cooper 