Magick

So, I've been thinking a lot recently about random things that I pushed off out of my mind a while ago, deciding that topics I will puzzle over and will never find the answers to are pointless.

However, one of those topics is magick and when you're unofficially dating a Gypsy, it's kinda hard NOT to think about it. And so:

Magick. I used to believe in it with all my heart as a child. I was that one girl who believed she was a witch, that one special child born with abilities many others didn't posses or didn't know how to hone. I'd take out books from the library on palm reading (yes, my elementary school library had an entire section on witch craft. Wow.) and I actually performed love spells that would bind me and the boy I liked together. Forever. I'm very happy those failed. I'm guessing it was because I put more thought into peeling the apple I was using for the spell than concentrating on the ACTUAL spell itself. Did I know the rules of wicca back then? Hell no! Our school just had spell books for kids (yes, I'm serious) with pretty pictures and instructions. Yeahhhh.

There was a lot more to it too. I remember going to the beach and singing. Seagulls would flock around me as if listening. They formed a perfect circle with me in the middle. My sister wondered what it was I was doing, but really couldn't care less because for once, I wasn't hanging off of her. Sometimes, I'd dip my feet in the ocean and sing there. I felt as if the ocean could hear me...was answering me. The last time I sang in the ocean, it was the fourth of July, this year. I was still buzzed from VKAM and Ameara told me to sing Mama Ocean for her, since she's landlocked. I did. And I blinked for a second and all of a sudden, there was a beautiful shell at my feet. Blue/gray with gorgeous brown snakelike patterns that look amber when wet. Something passed through my mind telling me that the ocean heard me, that it was responding to my voice, that it was thanking me for the few pieces of garbage I picked out of her a few days prior.

I didn't tell my dad or my friend about the shell. I just took it, thanked the ocean quietly, and left.

When I was four, I met my stepmom. I thought she was beautiful... she was tall, her cheekbones were predominant and high and while she could be childlike and fun, she was also wise and strong. Ambitious. She WAS the embodiment of Sagittarius.

My stepmom was the first person to tell me that magick was real. She told me stories of how her mom was a witch who used to do horrible spells in order to get her way, but stopped when she tried to hex another witch who sent it reeling back and caused her tongue to swell up in the back of her throat. She, apparently, learned her lesson.

My stepmother, B her name was, told me that she could feel things. When she was younger, she used an Ouija board with her sister and it amplified their senses. She told me she would wake up sometimes and see her sister, seemingly possessed, sit up in bed and begin talking to things that weren't there. She told me she had seen demons wait at the foot of her bed for her, holding her down with glares.

She gave me my first deck of tarot cards - a vintage deck from the 1930s (she had forgotten later on that she gave them to me. She still has them) and I fingered them as if they were the most beautiful things in the entire world. I did her reading. It was accurate. I felt as though I had found a new extension of myself. That all feelings I had prior finally had something I could channel them with to make sense out of all the mush. Then came the dreams.

I wasn't me in my dreams. I was someone else. And as someone else I didn't know WHO I was, but I had a different personality and it was just another day in life. Until I fell off a banister, or until a car hit me or until I got so drunk that I died of alcohol poisoning. I wondered why I always died in my dreams until I saw flowers by the sides of roads where I died in dreams from the previous nights. I must have been about 12... needless to say, I was freeked out.

I told this to my stepmother. She had told me that sometimes, before puberty, this happens to girls. I didn't understand what menstruating had to do with having visions of future deaths in your sleep, but no matter. A bit after I got my period, it stopped. The last thing I remember is that one night, I was an older version of a girl I knew and I had died from falling off the side of a fire escape in a city area. I am hoping that this, all of this... was just a child's imagination run rampant.

I'd feel things in my bedroom when I slept. I'd hear the pitter patter of feet running up and down the stairs. Once I woke up and saw a great black cat standing on my ceiling and looking down at me. He seemed started that I could see him (we made eye contact. His eyes were a beautiful gold - almost foxlike) and he quickly vanished. But again, I can cancel this out saying that it's because I am bipolar and again, my mind runs rampant.

Cats. I always see them. When I moved to New Jersey, my stepmother had already left. I hated it here. I still hate it here.

My first night in the house, I woke up and couldn't move. I felt as though there was something heavy on my chest, pushing the air out of my lungs. I thought I was going to die. I began panicking. It seemed like an eternity until I could finally sit up and breathe. This happened often and then one night, I looked forward and saw a cat curled up on my chest, watching me. I tried to scoot away but it was too heavy and I couldn't move. Finally, somehow, I managed and fell backwards off the bed. The last thing I saw before I blacked out was that cat peering at me from over the mattress. Staring at me.

I woke up in bed with the sun up as if nothing had happened. I had never seen that cat before. I doubt I will ever see it again. But sometimes... when I dance around my house and I am neither here nor there, I see many of them, cats I mean. All around the house, diving behind closet doors, sitting on sofas. I double take and then they are gone.

I have had more instances of sleep paralysis here. One time, I couldn't feel my body at all. I looked and there were.... creatures dancing in my living room. I got up and joined them, they welcomed me but I felt more like a stranger and a tricked victim than a guest. I rationalized that I was asleep and tried to wake up, but I couldn't feel anything. When I did wake up, I switched my location for napping and took the floor. Again, I couldn't feel my body. All of a sudden, I had a sensation of flight like I was getting higher and higher and higher and it felt so good, so right! But then I thought "I'm dying. I'm leaving my body - I'm not ready." and I woke myself up. I wonder what would have happened if I just let it be.

I don't feel things anymore.

I don't know when it started, but perhaps it was when my brother started asking me if magick was real. Our mother would always give me looks when he asked, and I will look him square in the eyes and say "Anything is real if you believe in it." He believed in faeries. It drove my mom mad.

I think I lost faith because I didn't have any answers for him. Yes, I felt things. Yes, I believed in faeries, I believed in mermaids, I STILL believe in mermaids... but where's the proof? How didn't I know that these feelings weren't just a fantasy to escape to in my head to get away from all of the bullshit? I began to put my faith into science.

I ignored everything I felt around me. Told it to go away, told it to shut up. Locked myself indoors, only came out to go for a drive with friends and stay at their houses. At one point, I forgot how to call upon that tingly sensation I'd sometimes get that would surround my body. I'm not sure but, I think that's magick.

But at the same time, it could just be a self awareness.

See, I can't tell my brother that something is real, because I feel like I'm lying. Where is the proof? I try my hardest to be an honest person. I dislike lying. I feel like the scum of the earth whenever I do because I do it so WELL.

The last time I felt magick, I had just finished saving up for a second hand keyboard at a thrift shop. I put all my soul into saving up for it, you have no idea. I was numb to magick at that point and just moved on. But when I got to the counter, they told me it was already sold.

The pain I felt... I had gotten my hopes up that I could FINALLY record, FINALLY write on a keyboard that WASN'T broken, that I could FINALLY reach my dreams, that all the struggling had paid off. But it wasn't true. It was another lie. And I should feel stupid because I fell for it again.

I felt a power inside of me, a burning. An anger, a hatred. And so, I went home and locked myself in my room. My mind was a tirade of chaos, calling upon all the magicks I ever did and did not believe in and told them that if they were real, they would not have let this happen to me.

I told them that they could not exist.

I haven't felt anything since then. Nothing. I feel... human now. Different, less magical then I did as a child. Mundane. A lesser being. Worthless.

But...

Whenever I am in a forest, I feel somehow connected with the earth. I cry whenever I see a tree cut down. I dive at bugs and save them whenever they are going to be stepped upon. I protect sprouts as if it's my life's mission. I never was this passionate when I still believed.

I feel as though I have a bigger connection with plants than I do with humans. Plants and animals. As if that didn't make me sound like a hippie.

I cry when trees die, I cry when I see roadkill. But I never cry when something horrible happens to the people I love. I didn't even cry when my friend Gabbi died.

Yesterday, I tried to astral project, but I got lost. It was pitch black and all I could hear was music. I think instead of going up, I accidentally went down into the deepest part of my mind. Neat, but not what I intended to do. I later scolded myself saying that astral projection hasn't even been proven and I was stupid for trying.

I miss the feel of being connected.

I'm stuck in the middle right now. I don't know what to believe. I do know though that I am scared and I fear the existence of magick. I got lost in it last time I believed in it. It took over my life. I was careless with my day to day living and started failing classes because I was too busy day dreaming about open fields and partially cloudy skies. Spells I would do when I got home. Soils I would ground myself on. No, I was never trained. I know next to nothing about wicca. But I could feel it. Or rather, I could feel SOMETHING.

Perhaps magick doesn't exist. But I do believe that there is something... alive about the earth. That we are all somehow connected with her. With the earth, with the stars (even scientists can not deny that we are all made of star dust).

The two things I still believe in are Mermaids and Astrology. I wonder why I can't be black and white on this subject. Why I can't rationalize anything here.

And this is what I've been musing about. I've been tossing and turning about it for the past nights. You see, I've been speaking to and hanging out with people who live magical lives as of late and they seem so happy...

I can summon that tingly feeling to my hands and it's stronger than ever. I just don't know what to do with it.