Do you believe in Heaven and Hell? Angels and demons? I never gave it much thought throughout my life. It wasn’t something my Mama raised us with. We weren’t atheists, but we didn’t practice any sort of religion, either. My Mama wanted to leave it up to my siblings and me to decide what we believed when we were ready. I didn’t get the chance to be ready to decide when I was forcefully told that God exists. But knowing and believing are two different things in my opinion. I know He’s there, but I don’t believe in His influence in my life. I probably should, but I don’t. But you didn’t come here to listen to me ramble about God. You came here for a story. My story. I’ll tell you upfront that it’s not always pleasant, and there may be things here that you don’t want to read about. You’ve been forewarned. It’s my story, and I’ll tell it as best as I can. Just don’t be mad if you’re disillusioned about something or another. We should probably start off with an actual introduction. My name is Aydan, but everyone calls me Dani. Or, at least, my friends and family do. I have a fraternal twin brother named Jaisen. We call him Jai. And an identical twin sister, Hunter. We came into the world on November 7, 1990. Our mother is Kayla Vinyard. She’s not our birth mother, but she is the only mother that we’ve ever really known. She fostered us from the day we were born, and then adopted us when we were only two years old. We’ll get to more on that in a little while, though. I know I didn’t mention a father figure, and that’s for a good reason. We had one, our Papa, but he’s not our dad in any sense of the word. He’s our uncle. My Mama’s older brother. He was the only father figure we had in our lives, but not for very long. He was out of our lives before the age of 2. I don’t have much use for Papa anymore, but before he left my life, I loved him dearly. Even though he was abusing me and Hunter. Okay, introductions are over. Now, I should probably tell you that I don’t remember this first part of the story. I only know it because it’s been told to me. My birth mother came into our lives once we were adults. So that’s why I have the beginning of this story. We never became close to her, and she died before we had a chance to get to know her, but she did tell us how we came to be in this world. You see, she was a prostitute. She’d been trafficked since she was about 14 years old. I don’t know anything about her family or if they ever searched for her. But she was 19 when she got pregnant with Jai, Hunter, and me. She said her pimp was cruel to her. And it got worse when he discovered she was pregnant. He beat her to unconsciousness in the hopes of causing a miscarriage. I don’t know if it was divine intervention or just luck, but the pregnancy stuck. Then, once she stated showing, he kicked her out. He said no man wanted to fuck a woman heavy with child. He probably wasn’t that eloquent, but it was words along those lines. So our mother took to the streets. She did what she could to survive, had no prenatal care at all, and gave birth to us in a smelly and wet alleyway in the rain. As soon as we were born, she picked us up and carried us to the nearest hospital. We were laid on a bed in the emergency room, and then she just turned and walked away. She said we were always on her mind, but she knew she couldn’t take care of us. Her hope was that some family would take us in and give us good lives. She got her wish, and we got a good family. Mama was a nurse at the hospital we were abandoned at. In fact, she was working the Emergency Department when we were left. She saw us first and called the police. She’s also the one that got us up to neonatal to be checked out and taken care of. Despite not having any prenatal care, all three of us were very healthy babies, with very good sets of lungs on us. We were small, because we were triplets, but given the givens, we weren’t in that bad of shape. We were all diagnosed with drug withdrawals, but other than that, we were as healthy as could be expected. When CPS got to the hospital, Mama was told that they might have to leave us at the hospital for a while because they didn’t have any foster homes available for three newborns. That’s when Mama told them that she wanted us. She was already a certified foster parent (just barely), and she didn’t have any children in her home yet. She said she wanted to take us and eventually adopt us. So the CPS person made a few phone calls to verify information and then signed us over to our Mama. We stayed in the hospital for about two months, but then Mama was able to take us home with her. She was a single mom with three newborns to support or a nurse’s salary. Money was always tight, but we never really wanted for anything important. She loved us more than her next breath. And she was there for everything. We couldn’t have asked for more. During the first 18 months of our lives, Papa helped a lot with taking care of us. He had inherited wealth from his father. Mama and Papa had different fathers, so she didn’t get any of the money when his dad died. So Papa didn’t have to work. He moved into the basement of Mama’s house and started taking care of us while Mama worked. He always had a camcorder in his hands while he was watching us. There are thousands of hours of video of my brother, sister, and me during those first couple years. The only thing Papa didn’t record was him molesting Hunter and me. I don’t remember it very well. But Mama got home early one day and walked in on him penetrating me with a finger and me screaming my head off. Hunter was on his lap next to me, also screaming her head off, because he had a finger inside of her, too. Mama grabbed us up, kicked Papa out of the house, and then called the police to report him. He was hauled off to jail, and we went through a rough patch of CPS visits and whatnot. Mama was found not to be culpable in any of the abuse that Hunter and me went through, and we were left in her care. Papa was found guilty of multiple charges of sexual assault on a child under 3 and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Mama was furious that that’s all he got. She knew he’d be out in under 8 years. We were about 18 months old when Papa went off to prison. Mama took some time off work and stayed home with us while everything was being sorted. She didn’t know what she was gonna do after everything was sorted. She was terrified to leave us with anyone after what Papa had done. It was like, if our own uncle could do that, then what could someone do that *wasn’t* related to us? In the six months that Mama took off work, a judge finally decided that Mama was a good mother to us and that we should be legally adopted by her. He said that he was impressed with her immediate reaction to her brother’s actions against her two girls, and that her willingness to testify against him was part of his reason for the decision. With so many children being abused in foster care, he knew we were in the right place because it wasn’t going to be allowed. We were going to be protected. Jaisen, Hunter, and me were twenty-three months old when the judge signed our adoption papers. One month away from our second birthdays. There was a big party at the house to celebrate. All of Mama’s work friends were there, and so were our grandparents and aunts. We had three aunts, but only the one set of grandparents. It should probably be mentioned now, rather than later, that I had more problems from our birth mother’s drug abuse than Jai ever did. Hunter was somewhere in between Jai and me with how much she suffered from the drugs. I was very hyperactive and had a really hard time with direct eye contact. It upset me. Mama learned very early not to look me in the eyes. It was one of the things the doctors suggested to avoid trauma. At least until I was old enough to enter therapy and start working on stuff like that. But the ADHD didn’t slow me down in other areas. By the time I was three years old, I was reading on my own. I loved books with a passion. I loved stories. Sure, they were only cardboard books at first, but it was still reading. Mama fed my passion as much as she possibly could. And encouraged the rest of the family to do the same. For Christmas and birthdays, and whenever else we got presents, she always told everyone to get me new books. I was always happiest when I got a new book from someone. I’d immediately sit down and start reading to Hunter. Although it was hard when multiple people gave me books all at once. I wanted to read them all at once. And that just didn’t work out very well. But I was about five when I was finally taken to a psychiatric doctor to be diagnosed for ADHD. I remember some of the process. The doctor said I had a “classic case” where drugs had been introduced before birth. He put me on medication and suggested therapy with horses. He also suggested martial arts once I was old enough that a teacher would take me. So that’s what we did. Hunter was prescribed art therapy as well as therapy with horses. The horse therapy was my favorite part of my school years. I started that when I was only five years old. Three times a week, after school, Hunter and me would be taken to the stables with our therapists for horse therapy. At first it was just learning how to take care of the horses, learning how to feed and brush them. Then we moved onto how to do other things like saddling the horses and putting on their bridals. I was so excited by the time I was actually able to ride my horse. His name was Shadowfax. I didn’t understand the name when I started the process, but then I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings in third grade and realized the meaning behind the name. I loved that horse. I felt like Lady Galadriel every time I got on that horse, because obviously I couldn’t be Gandalf. I was a girl. Jai teased me endlessly over that. He was like, “Lady Galadriel doesn’t ride Shadowfax! That’s Gandolf’s horse! You can’t POSSIBLY be the one riding that horse!” Hunter had an easier time. Her horse was named Argo, so she got to be the Warrior Princess. Although Jai found ways to tease her, too. Despite the teasing, Jai and me were always very close. All three of us were very close. Where you found one of us, you’d generally find the other two. Mama insisted that we have our classes together at school, instead of being separated in to different homerooms. She wasn’t worried that we’d rely on each other too much. But she knew we’d all have complete and total meltdowns if we were separated. And she knew that’d bleed over into our home lives. It took her until we were about four years old to get us to stop sleeping in the same bed together. She’d put us to bed, and then one of us would wake up and go crawl into the other’s bed. Usually she found us the next morning with Jai’s thumb in my mouth, my thumb in Hunter’s mouth, and our legs tangled together. She knew that we’d go back to that if we felt threatened during the day by not being together at school. The principal relented and we did school together. No one picked on Hunter or me. Jai would beat them up if they tried. And, at five years old, he’d discovered weightlifting, so he was a strong kid. I was finally put into martial arts classes when I was six years old. Mama found a teacher who’d take me even though I was so young. He taught Aikido to kids a bit older than me, but he said if I could keep up, then I could join the class. I never felt more at peace than when I was practicing the movements of Aikido. Sure, the sparring was fun, but the movements made me feel so peaceful and at ease. It was like my brain stopped for that time and just chilled with a cold drink for a while. Then, when I’d stop, it’d go back to bouncing around my head again. But I learned quickly that I loved martial arts. Over the course of my education, I went as far as I could in one form before starting another and doing the same. By the time I was eight, my hands and feet had to be registered as lethal weapons. Mama made sure to make me understand what that meant. I could not, under any circumstances, get into a fight with anyone. If there was going to be a fight, I had to leave it to Jai to protect me. I remember Jai’s Cheshire grin when Mama said that. I could drop him like a sack of potatoes, but I had to let him protect me. I hated it. He loved every second of it. Now, as far as school went, I was a very average child except for reading, writing, and English. Those were my subjects. Of course reading was easy for me. I was reading Lord of the Rings in third grade. The stuff my teacher had me reading was boring and so far beneath my reading level. Most of the time I blew through those books in a couple hours, then went back to reading my adventures and sci-fi novels afterwards. For Jai, it was math. He excelled at math. By the time we were in second grade, he’d been advanced to fifth grade math. Like me, he was average in everything else. Math was just his jam. For Hunter it was science. She was such a nerd sometimes. She loved chemistry and biology. She was in honors science courses by the time we were in second grade. We all did just enough in our other classes to keep us in the things we loved. For me, it was my martial arts classes. For Jai, it was his weightlifting and other gym activities that he was signed up for. For Hunter it was art classes and music. By the time we got to high school, Jai was playing football. He had loved football from a very young age. At least from the age of three. So he got onto the Varsity football team as soon as he possibly could. No, I was not a cheerleader. And neither was Hunter. We went to every game he played in, but I refused to become a cheerleader. That just wasn’t my jam. And Hunter wouldn’t be caught dead near a cheerleader. She was doing piano and guitar solos with the local symphony every time they performed, and displaying art pieces in the local gallery. She was way too nerdy to be a cheerleader. And I intimidated all the cheerleaders with my martial arts skills. There were rumors that I could take down an attacker in a second flat. It was probably true. Jai, Hunter, and me graduated high school in 2008. Jai immediately went off to college. He wanted to study sports medicine, play football, and make a break into the NFL. Hunter wanted to teach music and art, so she went off to the best arts school in the United States to learn from the very best teachers. For me, I knew that I wanted to teach martial arts with my life. So I wanted to learn from the very best there was, and raise my level of black belts as much as I possibly could. So I had Mama help me get my passport in order and then I flew to Japan. I spent the next six years in Japan, China, Thailand, and other Asian countries learning as many forms of martial arts as I could from the masters of their forms. I ate, slept, and breathed martial arts. I didn’t have any time for a love life or anything while I was in Asia. Just like I’d never had time for a love life in my home town of Durango, Colorado. I had a goal I wanted to meet, and I didn’t want to break up my timeline by getting involved with someone. Although that does not mean that I didn’t appreciate good eye candy when it walked by. I’ve never really been interested in boys. I mean, I’ve know what they look like since I was little, and that just really seemed awkward to me. But I was always very interested in girls. Mama warned me before I left that some of those countries weren’t very LGBTQ+ friendly, so I kept things close to the vest. But despite not having any torrid love romances while I was away, I had a very good time and enjoyed myself very much. I loved what I was doing. I got back to Durango when I was 24. I was back for our birthdays, actually. By then Jai had made it into the NFL and was playing for the Denver Broncos. I was so happy for him when he called and told me they’d drafted him in the 2nd round. Hunter was teaching at our old high school, and playing piano with the Durango Symphony. But we all showed up at Mama’s for our birthday and we celebrated with our family. As much of it as was still left anyway. Nanna and Bumpa passed away while I was gone, but I did get to FaceTime with them both before they passed. I was heart broken to lose them, and then on top of it, not be able to get back for the funerals, but my family understood. Everyone was so happy once we were all back together again. It was like no time had passed at all. Jai challenged me to a spar in the back yard. He thought he could take me because of all his time in the gym and in football. Brute strength and all of that. I had him in a leg lock, screaming for mercy, in about 25 seconds. He never tried to spar me again after that. And he’d warn anyone else who wanted to spar me that they were looking for pain. It was kinda vindication for me after all the years of him protecting me that I could now protect myself from anyone who wanted to hurt me. The Monday after our birthday, Mama and me went down to the bank to see about getting me a loan on a building to start my own dojo and gym out of. I had spent so much time learning, and now I wanted to teach. Mama put the house up for collateral, and I got my loan. I bought the building I’d been eyeing, and then I set to work setting up everything the way I saw it in my head. I hired a bunch of people to do the work I didn’t want to do, like the every day managerial work and book keeping, and then I started taking on students. For the first year I was working three days a week, maybe 6 hours a day. But then House Black Belt started growing. In my second year, I hired seven other instructors and we started working more than 40 hour weeks to keep up with the demand for our classes. I had a variety of forms being taught in the building, and the instructors teaching them were all of my calibre of knowledge. I also started hiring personal trainers for the gym side of the dojo. I was so happy with how things were going, and I got out of the red and into the black within two and a half years of opening. It was amazing. Of course I took off Sundays when the Broncos were in Denver so that I could go see my brother play. Mama, Hunter, and me always had a box seat with whichever girlfriend Jai had at the time. I didn’t think that boy was ever going to settle down. And on Saturdays when the symphony was playing, the three of us would go watch Hunter do her thing. Despite how much I was working, I still found time to do the things I enjoyed. Like going to coffee shops and listening to open mic nights. I met my first girlfriend in a coffee shop. Her name was Bo. She was definitely of the more demanding variety of women. I’m strong and capable of protecting myself, but I’m also very femme. I enjoy having someone older and stronger in personality than me in a relationship. She taught me so much in the two years we were together. We never lived together. Our relationship never got to that point. But I learned a lot about what I liked and what I didn’t, and what I wouldn’t allow in bed. Like I said, we were together for about two years. We might have been together longer, but she wanted to get married and move to Vegas. I was very happy in Durango, and I wasn’t ready to get married. I don’t know if I ever will be. I mean, I didn’t give it much thought, but I knew that I if I did get married, I was going to be with that person for the rest of my life. I couldn’t see myself with Bo into old age. Maybe it was the fact that Mama never married that made me think that way. Sure, he had boyfriends at times while we were growing up, but nothing ever so serious that marriage was talked about. She was just happy on her own most of the time. And so was I, really. For about four years things were just quiet and normal for the three of us. I lived above my dojo in an upstairs apartment. Hunter had an apartment about a block away. And Jia had a condo about 10 minutes away. We saw each other all the time and spent as much time together as we possibly could. Then, in November of 2023, something happened that would change our lives forever. It started off with nightmares. All three of us were having nightmares once in a while. Over the course of a couple months, the nightmares started getting more frequent. They were happening a couple times a week instead of once or twice a month. Then it was every night. No matter how hard we tried, none of us could remember the dreams once we woke up. It was like a mist that evaporated the moment we gained some sort of consciousness. Eventually, it got to the point where Hunter came over and we just decided we weren’t going to sleep ever again. Of course that isn’t a realistic way of dealing with nightmares, and we fell asleep on the 23rd of November 2023. That night, an Angel visited us while we were sleeping. She took us together to the Silver City, and she showed us everything that we’d left behind. She told us that we’d once been Angels serving God, and that we’d decided to Fall from Heaven into the lives we were living now. We were now Forsaken by God, and we’d never be able to enter the Silver City ever again. But the Angel said God never takes something away without giving something in return. She said that we had our soulmates out in the world somewhere. And, when we met those people, we would be with them forever. They would be just as immortal as we were. Then we were taken back to our bed, and Hunter and me woke up together to the realization of everything we’d left behind. It was a rough morning. Jai called a little while later and told us about what had happened to him. It wast he same thing. Hunter and me felt horrible for Jai. We’d at least woken up together and had each other to cling to while we cried our eyes out. Jia was by himself. So now, to tie up loose ends and say goodbye. Jai left the NFL shortly after our 30th birthday. He had injuries that he wasn’t comfortable coming back from, but he played for eight years. He had a nice long run. Afterwards, he came to my gym to become a personal trainer. He didn’t need the money. Far from it. He’d always invested well and took care of his NFL money. He won’t need to actually work for millennia to come probably. So he doesn’t take a paycheck from me. Instead, he has me donate it to charities close to our hearts. Usually we donate to sexually abused children and children in the foster care system. We never were shuffled around, but we all too easily could have been. It’s our way of acknowledging our luck. Papa has been out of prison for quite some time now, and while he did come back into our lives in our teenage years, it wasn’t for long. Mama made it clear she didn’t want him there. Hunter and me didn’t feel comfortable with him around, either. I haven’t seen Papa in years now. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him again. Either way, it doesn’t really matter to me. Hunter is still teaching at our old high school. But she’s making enough with her art and music that she doesn’t need the job teaching. She does it because she loves introducing teenagers to the world of art and music. They’re her passions and she wants to share them. As for me, well, I’m doing really well with my dojo. I could live comfortably anywhere I wanted to move, but I’m happy in my two bedroom above the dojo. As far as my immortality goes, it hasn’t really sunk in yet. We just turned 33 years old. I can’t begin to fathom an eternity yet. Maybe if you ask me in a couple hundred years or so. But, for now, this is all I have. I hope my story can inspire someone, or give them hope for the future. I wouldn’t change a thing. This is me. This is who I am. Take it or leave it. Either way, I’m happy with where I am.