I loved her and she loved me and that was the simulation we were trapped in, at least for a little while. We clung together, racing our fates while we kicked up dust in Martian landscapes, or fucked like frenzied, feathered angels on the astral planes. We had no teleos, but we swore we were going somewhere! Or that is what I so wanted to believe. But there came a day her madness consumed her, and so off-handedly she shattered my heart, spilled its many dreams, like it was a chintzy snow globe from a secondhand store. I violently popped up to the surface of the watery depths she had taken me down to, bent and bloated, a dead fish swollen and pale like the moon. I had to cast her from me to keep the barest shred of my soul alive. But it wasn’t easy. It took all the will and power I had left. Because I knew that she held the key to a mystery I’d been grappling with for most my life. And, honestly, I knew from the very beginning that she would transform me.

My world got very quiet. For a little while I still saw her, wandering heavy footed in the gardens outside my temple, crying out for her own forlorn reasons. I still danced with her in my dreams, because it seemed like the safest space in which to love her. And I sort of thought we could stay open to each other in spirit, but far away, working our crazy magik together on the fringes of our separate destinies. But she kept bringing her earth magik to bear on me, and I felt I had to resist and engage my spirits for protection. But my bruised heart, with its childish passion for the fantasy of her, howled and threw fits at the mere suggestion of her name. I knew, but deceived myself, that keeping a port open for that girl was dangerous. Because eventually it happened, that her spell hit some weak mark in me and at just the perfect time; the lust of Babalon’s season conspired to open the asylum that had therefor-to sheltered me from my own self harm of a sick and twisted love.

Yet, praise the goddess! It was only my wild, orphan child, with her hair trigger and a hunger to find the antidote for her pain, that escaped and heeded that girl’s call. But in mere moments my brutal love threw off her pretense revealing, all over again, her madness, blindness and selfishness when she drew her sword and cut the child down in the height of her hope for nothing that she had done to her. And worse, she cursed the child as a terrorist when she pleaded and cried for mercy at her hand. With her death, the entire edifice of the simulation that we were all trapped in was laid bare. I escaped with my dying child into the abyss, bewildered and sickened.

The moon has waxed and waned through these fallow seasons, and I’ve re-parented that wounded child, back to vigorous health. The echoes of that unbearable grief has died out and been replaced with the music of indominable source. We sit close as new love and new rituals inspire our dreams: dreams of a solar future, verdant and poignant with growth, and clarity and deep self trust. She has forgotten her wounds, her pains, at last! and maybe I have too. And that is maybe why my daughter nestles in close, clasps my hand and asks me to tell her a brand new story. On the eve of this Mercury retrograde, I clear my throat and I begin:

Once upon a time, a noble but sullied queen met a queer witch on her path as she walked in the gardens outside her kingdom. Because she was a witch, the queen asked her if she could foretell her future. The witch, her eyes full of hunger, bade the queen to lean in and whisper her question in her ear. She didn’t have to think about her question, because it was a question she had been asking herself for almost all of her reign. The queen asked to know if she would ever be clean. See, the queen had so much blood on her hands from one single moment when she gave in to fear, that original sin. But one moment of living falsely, one lie turned into two, and grew exponentially, until the fear defined her life and a great many had died at her hand. The witch smiled slyly and told the queen to follow her, and as she did, a dark fog began to rise. The vapor grew thicker as the queen tried to keep up with the witch, and she saw it was full of confusion and madness and incomprehensible pain. But the queen kept following, because she had suffered for her bad faith for so long and also her curiosity overcame her. She was wholly enchanted and wanted to know what this strange being was offering up. But the fog grew ever thicker, and the witch disappeared into it, and the queen found herself quite utterly alone.

For a moment the queen trembled. She maybe even cried a bit, quietly to herself. But then there in the mystery, alone in the salient, mad fog, she willfully rejected her fear, breathed deep and stood upright, remembering her class and her crown. She kept trying to find the witch and sang loving songs into the swirl to try to help her back to her, but the being she met at the start of this strange trip seemed to have thoroughly vanished. Time passed, quickly? slowly? she wasn’t sure about anything. And the queen began to lose sight of everything, including her kingdom and kin. But because she was not really afraid, she simply straightened up her bones, assumed her reign in the chaos, and began holding court from her new position in the mists.

But the witch, fixated on the queen and jealous, perhaps, of the queen’s steady heart navigating and ruling in the mayhem, thickened the fog. Then she began a round of dark spells. The queen could hear the witch’s hauntingly beautiful, but bitter, voice, leveling curses at her– “You are broken” “You are false, a fake” “You are too old” “You are wicked” “You stand for nothing” “You have no soul” “You have nothing to live for” –curses that, for awhile, seemed to come from nowhere or from every direction at once.

As each curse struck her, the queen’s skin grew smooth and polished, bright and reflective. It caught every, little ray of light, no matter how accidental or hapless, and radiated it outward. Curse after curse, each weak light ray found its strength, coalescing like memory, they illuminated and reflected back the witch’s own debased existence.  The stain of the queen’s former fears peeled off her, turning the fog crimson; and the fog began to congeal and shift and take on a heavy, amorphous shape. The queen saw that she was naked. Her flesh had turned into a great mirror that reflected her frailty, her vulnerability, but also shined love and the brilliance of her heart. And her kingdom, a mere reflection in that mirror, was nothing but the indistinct shape of the witch she had trusted to follow, now sullied and in a rage facing her own soulless, empty, darkness.

In a final, desperate act, the witch snatched the queen’s crown from her head, putting it up into the place where her own head might have been, had she been able to regain for herself a solid form. Still, the shapeless witch swelled up with hubris, mimicking royalty, pointing at the rocks and the trees and the beasts of the forest, snapping out orders in an unintelligible tongue, while they ignored her, lending no heed to her egotistical delusions of grandeur. The dethroned queen saw how her dirty stain, birthed of fear, that darkness she had dragged with her and had tried so long to grasp, to clean, and that she had hidden with sorrow for so many years, it now formed the flesh and royal dressings of that queer witch, who had betrayed her into chaos.  And suddenly, without her crown, the queen became very light. She easily rose into the air like the birds and butterflies she loved, and she flew in the direction of her dreams with a grace and strength that comes from deep wisdom. She smiled softly then, because she knew, at last, she was clean.

My child claps her hands and beams. She is strong and innocent and, because she has so fully recovered, I know that many brilliant and sweet delights will offer themselves to her wherever she goes. I hold her tight to myself and tell her that, although we have suffered much, although we were mocked for our weakness and cursed for our strength and flushed from our lives, we have so much to be grateful for. Cast into the void, I can see the vast scope of my life that looks much like the sign one writes to denote infinity. We are moving forward. Continuing on from the place where the lines intersect and cross. I see how there, we became dirty. And I see how here, at these crossroads, our karmic debt was snatched from us, passed on, paid in full. We are not royal, my child, my heart and me. But we are finally clean.