I have been here...

I have never told this to anyone, because I've always thought it was too much to explain and people wouldn't believe me. This would be the first time I attempt to explain what happened. I remember as a kid, trying to figure out how to predict the next event that would happen when experiencing deja vu, if it's already happened, then all I need to do is remember, right?

My goal was to ambush the feeling instead of having it ambush me. I failed many times because the moment had already happened before I even had time to realize I missed my chance. I figured I had to ditch the feeling of 'I've felt this before' and focus entirely on 'what's going to happen?' immediately, to not waste any time.

Deja vu would happen often to me as a kid so I could practice processing prioritizing the prediction rather than experiencing the feeling. The problem was it happened so fast you only get that you've experienced what you're going through AFTER it's happened. I was in recess in first grade when I felt deja vu again, it happened so frequently by this point it had lost its novelty so I could skip the recognition phase and dove straight into thinking, 'okay what happens next, what ha-'.

Then, all at once so many things happened in an instant. I spun around, but the more accurate way to describe what it felt like was instinct. Even though my body turned to look behind me, I never once willed myself to do that. It was also fast, like my body itself knew I couldn't miss it. While my body did this, in my mind I had what felt like a distant memory and feeling of a kid lying ground crying on his belly with his arms above his head. At the same time, I felt like a nagging voice telling me I was forgetting something. All this happened in the second my body spun around to see behind me. I didn't know what I was looking for but I remember knowing not to look away or else I wouldn't see it. A kid that had been sprinting from the far end of the playground to the classroom caught my eye, and I stayed fixed on him like a camera tracking a football player sprinting towards the goalie until... he fell. He fell face first and as his body made contact with the asphalt, my mind processed two words: "BROWN BLACK". I suddenly knew what the voice in my head was nagging me about. I had forgotten the color of his clothes, his shirt was brown and his pants were black. The boy raised his head and upper body with his arms to look up a little and started to cry.

The most confusing thing to explain, was what I felt afterwards. I was trying to recall how I knew to turn around when another thought interrupted that one followed by another. 'Why did I forget the color of his clothes? What was the image of him falling down doing in my head before it happened? How did I even know the color of his clothes? How come I didn't remember until he fell down? Why couldn't I make the connection that the boy I saw lying on the ground and the one I was looking at running were the same person?'

Then I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, I couldn't explain to myself how I could think of so many things all at once, when I had the time to process all that and think so many thoughts. It felt like each thought was a layer stacked on top of each other in that instant. Like every thought had been drawn on thin translucent paper, then were stacked in a pile and held up to the sun so I could read every single sheet of paper at the same time but each thought occured individually like I had a mind for each thought so they could occur simultaneously. Time feels so hard to pinpoint for that moment, I can't remember where I summoned the time to be able to think so many things at once, it's the hardest thing to wrap my mind around. I haven't been able to do this again, since the high frequency of deja vu as a kid helped me grow accustomed to the feeling. Now I'm 25 and only get deja vu once every year or two and it catches me completely off guard. After realizing I've had deja vu again, I remember what happened to me as a kid and think to replicate what happened, only to not have deja vu for a long long time. Has anyone felt anything like this, or remotely similar?