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February 10 - February 22, 2020
Because when I sacrifice my custom ringtone to the vibration gods and sit down at my desk, the scent of the stars blowing across the Santa Anas and into my open window, I feel it wake up. The real magic. The kind that’s bound to blood and culture. To history. To violence I say a thousand thanks a day for never knowing.
Maybe we were just two people chasing numbness because we didn’t know what the stardust inside us was for.
Magic and the starsong and the guiding hands of my girls in the sky spin stories in the cozy angles, draw glittering threads from the anchor points that will build the foundation of their life together.
Her sentences fracture when she gets upset, the rift of two languages springing up like a chasm between them.
The fight goes out of her, her shoulders slumping, and I almost feel bad. But there’s a galaxy of spirit sisters and grieving ancestors and a million intersections of stars between us, unreadable even to me.
For a second, I think she’ll raise her face, smooth my hair back, look me in the eyes, and build a bridge with her words. Isn’t that what mothers are supposed to do?
Mamí says love and magic get mixed up, that they make it harder to trust your instincts, easier to get lost.
For a minute, I set the phone down, closing my eyes, letting the song fill my head and the fading constellations dance behind my lids.
The starsong is louder now, swelling in a way that says something’s coming.
I close my eyes again, surrendering to this feeling, the influence of a new constellation pulling at me. Every one of my candle flames is blazing, casting warbling gemstone lights and streaky glass-shadows on the wall.
“Isn’t it weird,” Chuy told her, “to think that we’re all related?” “Cats are related to lions.”
He says that red eggs on Easter are only pious gestures, and holy water to bless the house is purely superstition. There are no witches, no magic, just a way of trying to touch a place they can’t go back to. It doesn’t matter. I was still raised to bury saints in the yard.
know that sometimes boys look at you because you have hips, and not because they care what you think about anaphase and metaphase. That even though you can say all the bosses and underbosses and consliglieres on The Sopranos in order of episode and importance, they really just want to see you naked.
The sacred mysteries didn’t stop being mysterious just because the world changed and got fast internet, and there’s magic in the little things, even if my dad doesn’t see it.
The catch is this—her way of helping is her way. Sometimes the way she helps you is by raining fire on all your enemies.
No one really believes they’re witches—not with any fervor anyway. But they do wonder. The way you wonder, as a child, if your stuffed animals talk when you’re not there. You know they don’t... Right?
Tea doesn’t fix anything. It’s just comfort you can hold.
If witchcraft is the voice of women rising free and powerful (to change the world, make it ours, on our feet instead of on our knees) then I wish to be a witch more than anything.
I understand now that magic is not for wickedness, not for the devil, not for those with cruel hearts. It’s for hope. For survival. It thrives in the darkness not because it is dark in nature, but because the fire shines brightest then.
