Her Road To The Moon: Part One
"So maybe, you should pretend that everyone you know is on stage and realize that you don’t have to join in the play."
"That’s what I do most of the time, but I feel like I am the only person in the audience and it’s really lonely."
This morning, I became intrigued with palmistry. I studied the lines of my hands and instantly became fearful of the marriage line that seemed to split, faintly. I mean really, it was nearly undetectable but I was worried that it might be. Growing up, my life didn’t offer much in the way of security. I still struggle with it. My soul has surely found it’s mate, it nearly jumped out of my chest when I first saw him and still, when I see my husband—butterflies, every time. It’s just, nothing I have ever loved has loved me back until our souls found each other and I am so scared of losing that. Fuck that faint, almost non-existent split line. I trust my inner voice now and fear cannot quiet fate.
I found the psychic triangle in the slightly rough flesh of my right palm, with a little cross hovering above, mixed in among the other lines and wrinkles. The mark of a witch, someone who escaped getting burnt or drowned because they practiced witchcraft. Come to think of it, that’s basically the story off my life.
this is a story of a magic little girl who grew up hard, not knowing her beauty or her truth. Having talents and wit that everyone tried desperately to snuff out…
wait…maybe you should read on and discover your own magic because I am telling you, it’s there.
I have been burnt so many times and nearly drowned in grief, sometimes I still feel myself floating there at the bottom of a cold, dark pond praying for death. But it doesn’t come and I know I’m not done yet, I’m just tired. My spirit is not broken but I am old. On the outside I look like a young woman, inside I feel like I am wrinkled and worn. My heart is like an ocean, deep and vast and as far as you can see it exists despite efforts to hide or conceal it.
As far as witchcraft is concerned, well, that comes a bit later but now let’s talk about the first time I called myself a witch and believed it.
It was the Fall of 1991, I was 12. After school my younger brother and I played among rust-colored leaves that crunched too loud for my liking. The little wood-shingled home where I slept each night felt like a hotel, it never felt like home. There was discord and silence. My room was painted mauve and had a stenciled border around the top. I laid in my bed at night and stared at the clear sky—-black with glimmering white specks. Before falling asleep I spoke to the Spirit. Some nights I asked for a new bike, others, for my parents to love me. I thought about EVERYTHING. There were days when an economy-sized paint bucket became my witch’s cauldron, it held leaves, pond-water, rusty nails that were found in the woods, thorns I carefully removed from sticker-bushes and occasionally, a brown toad. I loved the woods and would have gladly left the cold, mauve hotel for the comfort of crickets and the smell of earth. I heard the song in the forest and it sounded a lot better than my bickering, baby-booming parents. Dad was selfish and distant, Mom was lonely and bitter, a lot of that came down on me- a peppery little witchlet with a curious mind and fire in my veins.
Have you ever noticed that plain women are practically allergic to the wild-women? Our eyes sparkle, we create beautiful things, there is a poem in our hearts, we ask questions, we love absolutely, we’re messy and there’s no taming us. It’s all strange and sparkly. Plain women hate us because they want to be us. The saddest part? We want them to be us, too. We want everyone to be us and I have yet to uncover why it is that everyone is not. There’s ancient texts, folklore, psychology and philosophy but nothing quite nails it. Anyhow, I was far from plain and felt quite out-of-place in my life. I remember wondering why I was here on this Earth, wanting to help people, wanting to hug everyone and to talk to lonely folks, I would make jokes to see them smile. No one that I knew, truly understood me. It all felt like a dream and at times, a nightmare. It escapes me how the book came into my possession but there it was, in my hands, “Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth,” a book about two little girls that form a friendship and playfully dabble in witchcraft. It was sweet and it helped me to escape but it was more than that…it was my truth. At the very end of the book, as I read the last sentence it struck me, “I am a witch.” Nothing, besides the love I have for my husband and daughter, has ever felt truer. And so, I was a 12 year old witch but that is only a small part in all of this because that year, the heartache began, that year I felt the all-encompassing blackness of hurt.
snowghoul
titsay
yousharknotpass
