Nocturnal Rainbows

By Candace Atkinson

About the Book
There is a point in everyone’s life, a moment that changes your trajectory. A disruption to your linear path: inertia. What happened to me was just that, but that’s not what is paramount, because somehow, I found my way back. I think, How do you know who you are? How do you know if you’re being authentic? What small infractions caused so much chaos that it brought you to you?
If authenticity is the main contract, how do you sign it? How do you surrender to it? You don’t. You surrender to more than you. You sign a contract within your soul that is connected to more than just your brain. In reality, you can’t sign this contract because it was signed long before you even knew your brain, body, or consciousness. As Plato called them “forms”, spiritualists call it a soul.
In this novel, all of the concerns I have progressed through, and are still living with, are addressed. As this work is a work in progress, as am I, it will be distributed in volumes.

About the Author
Candace Atkinson has always had a passion for learning and a love for God, but her views were always unorthodox. Though baptized Christian and later raised Mormon, she never submitted to all the views that religious validation required, but still felt a deep connection to a higher power. After going through the traumas depicted in this fictional novel, she had a profound spiritual awakening at the age of 23 after six months of meditating, and having never inquired into mysticism or Hinduism, she found a new way of thinking, living and being.
It is her hope that through the description of her trials, maybe just one person can amble through their own a little more graciously than she may have.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Mar 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685378165

Book preview

Part One

Chapter One

Jannie Riddel knew something was awry that late October evening as she walked through downtown Massachusetts, after a bout of consumption. She could feel the presence, sense the shadow, but she just kept walking—too terrified to turn around.

Molly Sims’s twenty-third birthday party was just that: a celebration of life, and a life Jannie was not too fond of at the moment. They had been friends for years, though Jannie was a year younger, but this was it! Molly knew that Jannie had an inkling of desire for Mark. How could she do this? It didn’t matter. She was two miles from her car, heels in hand, and her feet were killing her. Consumed with thoughts of the night Jannie, being drunk, fell into the street just as a hand went out and grabbed her, she dropped her shoes.

Mark! What the fuck! Jannie exclaimed. I thought you were still at the party. Steadying herself, she pushed Mark away.

I saw you stumbling out of Frederick’s so I wanted to make sure you got a taxi, but no… were you seriously considering driving in this state?

Jannie had a look of fire in her eyes. What do you care if I did? she spat.

Mark looked at her with inquisition. This ungrateful little brat. Didn’t Daddy ever teach her to be a little more grateful when somebody saves their life? And so what if she’d seen him with Molly? They weren’t an item; he was a free agent. Besides, Molly had just been a game: Jannie had been leading him on for months.

I care enough to have just saved your drunk ass from getting hit by a car, Mark reminded her.

My hero! Should I thank you now? she taunted. Would you like a medal? she continued. I suppose the gallant ser should be knighted by the fair maiden, whom he’s just rescued from the concrete! Jannie rolled her eyes and stumbled to pick up her shoes when Mark grabbed her wrist.

Honestly Jannie, you’ve been a bad girl… about to drive drunk, look at the dress and stripper heels you have on, and you are an absolute tease. 

Jannie had been oblivious to the deserted streets, the dark cars parked along the streets—the alleys leading to other streets—when as Mark said these words, which didn’t register danger at first, he dragged her into an alley almost directly next to them. As Jannie tried to analyze the situation, she finally went to scream when Mark punched her square in the jaw and choked her while fumbling with his pants. The smell of trash permeated what felt her entire body. It was evident somebody had too much and threw up what smelt like acid. Or was it the blood that tasted like acid? Jannie couldn’t conjecture; her mind went blank. At that moment, as Mark thrust himself inside her, Jannie did not exist; this moment did not exist. She completely dissociated from reality. 

It didn’t last that long; years later she found out Mark had been on Cialis. But the damage had been done. She was left there, blood dripping from her mouth, still trying to breathe, trying to comprehend what just happened as tears streamed down her face. What am I supposed to do now? she thought. In this delirium, she forgot about her car. In sober disbelief she walked and walked, and kept walking until somehow she reached her house. 

Once inside, she went straight to the shower to wash the filth off of her while sobbing, but that didn’t help; she couldn’t wash away herself, her conscience. So, she crawled into bed and kept sobbing. She at last drifted off to sleep only when she heard a comforting voice telling her to Just go to sleep, that sounded so real, she stopped and looked around. That was weird, Jannie thought and was out. In the morning she awoke to find the previous night wasn’t some terrible nightmare. This really happened. Mark raped her!

She went to look in the mirror when she fell, still too tired to walk. Despite the lethargy she got back up and used her surroundings as leverage. There was a huge gash in her lip, she felt a bump on her head as a flashback of being thrown into the wall and hitting her head distraught her mind. Continuing to examine just brought more memories to the surface, and Jannie could not stop the flow. Luckily, there was a bottle of vodka in the freezer. After pouring herself a large glass she crawled back in bed for another twelve hours.

A few weeks later, Jannie reluctantly agreed to meet Molly for lunch at an Italian restaurant chain called The Blue Crab after incessant calls from Molly, for it was pertinent that Jannie confided in someone. As she arrived at The Blue Crab, Jannie sat at the bar having small talk with Molly. When the moment arrived, she didn’t know how to proceed.

Molly, Jannie said timberly, something happened the night of your birthday party… with Mark.

Jannie, I know. I am so sorry I kissed him.

No, not that. I think Mark sexually assaulted me…

At this Molly got very defensive but played it cool. A year later when it came out that it was rape, Molly still thought it was just sexual assault. Though, didn’t rape to a certain degree even fall under sexual assault? But these were also the same friends that referred to it as a stupid rape issue, so their opinions no longer really mattered to Jannie. That chapter was closed, and those characters were not going to make it till the end of the book—and that’s exactly how she wanted it.

Along with everyone else, Molly chose Mark and not one person believed Jannie. Maybe because she had feelings for him, maybe because they had previously had a fling, maybe because Jannie was a party girl. Being ostracized from her life, victim shamed (and blamed), mocked—abandoned in her most desperate times—Jannie went off the rails. Alone in her mind she was driven by fear and fear alone. Though she didn’t mourn those friendships, she mourned herself. She mourned her carefree spirit and, well… she mourned her former life. She had been reincarnated into the very demons that haunted her day and night, for even in her dreams the damage everyone had a part in drove her to insanity.

There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity[…] – Patrick Rothfuss

An array of names and diagnoses had been thrown at Jannie the years following the rape and insanity and they changed freely from season to season. One day she was bipolar, the next schizophrenic. The next week, that would be thrown out, too. Almost a decade had passed and Jannie was still celibate and still couldn’t trust men—or even women, for that matter. Jannie spent the next seven years thinking she was the problem, feeling oppressed as everyone threw her traumas (including the insanity) in her face. Making her hide within her own mind, but yet showing up feigning consideration when Jannie got seriously ill and started having temporal lobe dissociative seizures (as if these people were anyone that Jannie had wanted to hear from, but narcissists always think they are the answer).

Jannie didn’t know what became of Mark, or Molly for that matter. Even when a mutual friend died, she couldn’t bring herself to make an appearance. Finally, at thirty, she began to heal. After years of therapy, Jannie was ready to set out in the world again, to flap her wings, if you will. She finally slept with someone and wept because now Mark wasn’t the last person inside her. But still she felt nothing. It was as if when she let it go without any resolution, she completely shut herself off. The problem with shutting off negative emotions is even happy emotions became a threat. Often what haunts us the most is not the few moments it took to destroy our lives, rather the fact that we let it destroy us at all. We’re sickened at what we let it take away, for five minutes is nothing to a decade—though all we can really do is be grateful we survived at all. Every day was a struggle, every night a literal nightmare. Jannie was distressed from sunup until sunup. She fell to 95 pounds more times than she could count, and she looked years older than she was from all the crying she had done over the years. Would anyone ever love me? she wondered, for though she knew there were those that had love for her, she’d never been anyone’s priority—that is to say, she always felt like a backup dancer watching someone else take the lead.

This isn’t real, Jannie thought as she just observed. Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe and as a recurring theme was drowning—or trying to swim—in a pool of water away from these people who years before chose a rapist. When suddenly she heard "Marco…" echoing in the caves.

Oh, no, Jannie knew that voice, knew that game.

She was pulled back underwater nearing the deep sea when she looked down only to find herself smiling a wicked smile back. With this Jannie arose dripping sweat in soaked sheets. As she did most nights, she thought about Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams nearly every time she woke up. To calm herself she usually smoked a few cigarettes and laid back down for bed after her sheets had dried. Life up until this moment had been a series of the blame game, but now it was apparent: No one cared; no one would ever care. No one had ever cared. Jannie thought this in somber silence while the world outside mimicked this feeling. Alone. Desolate. But as she soon learned after being abandoned and left for dead by Mark and all her former friends next to the trash—discarded after being used—that being alone was better than being in the wrong company. And as Jannie soon learned, she was never again entirely alone.

Chapter TWO

If Jannie hadn’t been fascinated with herself to begin with, she sure was now. It wasn’t full Dissociative Identity Disorder yet, but borderline—though she scored over a thousand out of forty-five points suggesting DID. But those specialists were scarce, and every time Jannie tried dealing with this she went straight for the vodka. She drowned herself in alcohol for years while feeling all the while that she was drowning inside. Having joked for years about multiple personalities, it wasn’t that much of a shock when it was learned that that was where the voices came from that began that very night, the psychosis—all of it. She always quoted Marilyn Monroe (how cliché, I know): It’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. Well, now she was a one-woman (or how many were there?) show.

When Mark took what he wanted he not only took a part of Jannie, but what was left fractured. That is to say, she broke. Her consciousness split and being so utterly alone the voices were more prominent. (Now this might sound like some science fiction, but when a trauma is begot on somebody that their mind cannot handle it splits, and there is an infinite amount of times the consciousness can split.) This is to protect the part(s) of you that have been so traumatized that you hid so far inside yourself that something—or someone—had to take over. But as I said, it wasn’t full Dissociative Identity Disorder. As even though Jannie’s memory was something of a ghost, she knew her different personalities and soon even welcomed them. For giving them reign she was free to just be, and in this she found peace.

Maybe it was more like detachment from physical reality but that detachment felt like none of it actually happened, although… even that raised a question: If this very physically real event happened to Jannie, who was inhabiting her body at the present? She knew it was a part of her, but she could not become cognizant of how there could possibly be more of her than she even knew about. So, she did what she did best: hid behind the comedy of it all. For as Chuck Palahniuk wrote, Sometimes the best way to deal with shit is to not hold yourself as such a precious little prize. And it was quite comical… if not so tragic.

As Jannie did within her dreams she often just observed from third person what was transpiring in the physical world, while she withdrew into her mind, and in that found a passionate desire to feed it. She’d always been somewhat of a nerd: Frequenting Borders and Barnes and Noble, she felt a sense of belonging that she rarely had ever felt in the world. Those aisles were a playground where the fictional characters—or sometimes very real people’s lives—jumped from the page and enchanted her mind, and this only grew more intense when she went from the party girl to a recluse