Shell

It was still Lammas, the first day of autumn harvest, as I sat down to write this. I had gone for a walk on the fields to spend the auspiciously minted coins I´ve kept on my altar on a microwave meal and a Monster Monarch. Money is meant to be put into circulation; new coins will take their place. On my way back I happened across the shell of a blackbird´s egg and picked it up, but as I inspected the remains more closely I realized that it would be bad luck to bring it home. This egg had been broken from the outside, not the inside. When a baby bird is ready to hatch, it pecks a circle along the meridian of the egg and kicks the halves apart with its feet. This egg had been shattered, and a dried-up membrane was still clinging to one of the shards. I had crafted a red spell card depicting a viper, sun and moon, two two-headed arrows, and my thumbprints a while back and carried it in my backpack to wait for the right time to gift it. I knew that this was it; I set the egg shards on top of the card, placed it gently into the long grass a step away from the path, sanitized my hands as to not become infected with the ill luck that had destroyed the potential for life within the egg, and walked back home enjoying my Monster.

The rest of my evening was uneventful. At the gym I was feeling the diet, and my feet were slow and heavy. But this discomfort is only going to accompany me for a few weeks, and after that the fruit of my hard work will be much more clearly visible as the fat will be peeled off the muscle like cream off milk. Of course, my body still runs on estrogen, so there will always be some softness. But as I dream of becoming a parent, now even that softness has a meaning. When I woke up in the morning, I read in the newspaper that the older of the children who had been in the accident at Kuusijärvi had passed. The younger child is in critical condition still. I want to express my deepest condolences to the parents and wish the family support and healing as they are trying to come to grips with what has happened. I felt awful when I read that the police is now investigating the tragedy as parental neglect. I do not know enough about the law to know if this would be done at all times (EDIT: yes, this is standard practice), or if the family´s immigrant status may have played into the opening of the investigation. It feels cruel towards the surviving family members. Once again I´m thinking about the fragility of life and how every good thing we have can be taken from us in a heartbeat. The shell-shards of the egg I had found had also once been someone´s child, taken too early, whether by cruel humans or natural predators is impossible to say. Some tragedies feel too bad to be allowed to exist, and surely the death of a child is one of them. But morals, and spiritual pursuits, and magic, and religion, and God, and ought-to are no protection against the is.

I had a nightmare in which I was a karaoke host again, and my ex-girlfriend walked into the bar. When she recognized me, she attacked me and coiled around me like a python, and no matter how hard I struggled, she weighed me down with her malice. I was still in high school when we met, and she was in her thirties. The full weight of how fucked up that was didn´t hit me until I was in my thirties myself. Obviously, I had realized by the time that I was in my mid-twenties that the difference in power and maturity had been significant, and it puzzled me why psychiatrists had blamed me for the relationship when I had clearly been groomed into it. Perhaps they had thought that ”tough love”, AKA slut-shaming me for being sexually used by a thirty-year old lesbian with a diagnosed borderline personality disorder, might snap me out of it. It wasn´t very effective. It had been about survival for me; it was about moving in with her or returning to my parents´ house. And I would not go back to my parents´ house, not even when I had to wrestle a knife off of her and it sliced my left hand badly enough that I had to get seven stitches and the nerve damage never completely healed. It was still better than the crushing psychological oppression and covert incest I had to deal with at my parents´ place. Me staying was not a sign of me being insane, it was a sign of me being truly out of options. I did leave eventually, and got my first apartment by myself, and got my first familiar, Nera. Unfortunately the ”very nice” psychiatric nurse student managed to weasel himself into my life, and I never got to heal from the trauma of my first two relationships because he was there to give me plenty of new trauma. Why is it that little boys pick eggs out of blackbird´s nests and throw them against the ground? To gain ownership over the lives that could have been? To take pleasure in the pain of the parent birds watching helplessly? To revel in the cosmic burst of brown-dappled blue, clear viscosity, and sun-yellow richness? Why do men and women seek out broken and damaged young things and claim them as their own to play with them as they please? They are no helpers, they are no protectors, they are no lovers; they are jailers, and owners, and pain-eaters.

I think that I am better able to handle my pain and my past now because I finally have the blazing sun of my future to look forward to. I know I will get a family. I do not know how it´s going to look like yet, but I know I will get one. And while tragedies do exist, good things exist too. There are children who make it to adulthood. There are blackbird eggs that get to hatch and grow into baby birds that grow into big birds. And there are abuse victims who are gentle enough to break the cycle and tough enough to rise above it. I´ll be alright. The spellwork of yesterday has been set free, and it is now flying all around the cosmos and making a nest on top of a rainbow to hatch a clutch of outcome-eggs in. And my next text is going to be a hoot, a real piece de resistance. One, two, three. Yesterday, today, tomorrow. Past, present, future. Three of them for three of me, for I master all three of them.