When I am in pain, I want to vanish into the darkest skirts of the earth and never return again.I want to evade the eyes and words of everyone around me and descend into a cave, with moths and indigo bubbles and scarab beetles swarming my head, protecting me from dark thoughts. I want to devour everything that is natural and purge all that is artifice. I want to return to the ancient way and dance with the old gods. To run. Tripping over a thousand roots eagerly drinking from purple soil, galloping into the sky, pirouetting, dancing in the ether with the stars, until I fragment into a thousand pieces and become one of them myself.
I find myself puzzled by these aspects of my character, so eager to keep my secrets close so I can be all things to all people. Isn’t that silly?
That I don’t want to belong to anyone, but I want to belong to everyone. I am obsessed with the human condition and I want everything to feel forbidden. I am afraid of losing the most beautiful years of my life. So I spread myself out, like strawberry jam, hungry and eager to observe new lands and people and ideas with an insatiable appetite. I want to inhale it all and leave nothing unexplored. Remain exhaustingly alive and lucid. Feel my secrets worn as layers of ruffled satin, of encouraging mysteries, that only increase my intimacy with myself. To comically observe my own abrupt alternation of insane joy and the most unbearable anguish. I wonder if all of the secrets I accumulate will stain me, taint me, or become treasures of my reckless life that I take out and observe in my old age, one by one, like precious jewels. Giggling.
Perhaps in spreading myself so widely, I rid myself of the vulnerability in being truly known. Or of being seen in totality, rather than in curated, bite sized portions. I had to tape goddesses, fairies, magic symbols and divine avatars all over my world to protect me from the trauma of being alive. To stop the world from happening.
But the world doesn’t happen to us, they tell me. It happens in response to us, in a dance with us. It takes the form of our resonance. To be a Witch is to know this.