Musings

I swore I would never be like my family. Growing up, my parents were a constant source of embarrassment and the cause of my bullying at school. The only thing they said to me when I came back crying was: “They don’t understand. Forgive them.”

It’s funny how the words of Jesus were used to cover up their unholy acts which led to my crappy childhood. It’s also funny how the kids who were making fun of me somehow had the stupidest accidents after a while. By the time I was in the last class, there were too many accidents to ignore, and no one was talking to me anymore. I went from being the weird kid to being the ghost.

But this story is not about my parents, nor about forgiveness. This is the story of how I became like them.

Simon and Sarah, my father and mother, never hid from me the fact that they practiced magic, nor the fact that people have a very narrow outlook on what magic is and that they are either afraid of it or simply don’t believe in it. For them, magic was in everything and everywhere, and no, not in the hippy trendy 21st-century kind of way. They simply practiced it both since they were babies because their parents before them were witches. And you better believe that witches, my parents type at least, are a very, very, closed community and they don’t only know one another, but they also do marry between themselves. Nothing to do with strengthening the bloodline or such stuff, they just like their lives to be kept as private as possible.

Here I am, talking about my parents again. But you do have to understand how imperative it was for me not to become like them. It was something I had announced to them for as long as I could remember myself, and even though it was clear they didn’t like it, especially my father, I must give this to them: they did not push me to change my mind. They told me that other children decided this too for themselves and that magic would always be there for me if I changed my mind. “It was in me”, they said. And oh, if only I knew how right they were.

The real story starts a couple of days after my 20^th birthday. I was in my last year studying Literature, and I already knew, with absolute certainty, that I wanted to be a writer. I had mild success with a couple of short stories in some writing contests online, and I wasn’t closeted about my drafts. Everyone who wanted to spare a moment could read them and tell me their opinion and I listened to all of them – sometimes following the advice of my readers and other times just keeping in mind what I would like to avoid or just simply marveling at how each person can have their own opinion about how any work of art would become better if only the artist would twitch this and that in their way. But that’s human nature for you. I didn’t really mind. As long as I had ideas and a place to unleash them, I was content. My professors were encouraging, I had high grades and a scholarship for a master’s degree seemed closer than ever.

And then came the offer that changed everything. A small but respectable publishing house offered me a deal. They had read one of my short stories and they believed that it could be a full-length book which they were very interested in publishing and promoting since it was exactly the kind of genre and topic they were focusing on at this period.

Now listen. If you are an aspiring writer who doesn’t know how publishing works, you might think that this was an offer I would have to think about. If you do know how publishing works and how much disappointment, rejection, and endless query letters you must send (all of course tailored to each publishing company and agent you are addressing the query to), you understand that this wasn’t an offer I could say no to. I said yes, yes, a million times yes, like James Joyce’s yes at the end of Ulysses yes, and I sat down, ready to gain my author title for real and stop feeling like an imposter every time I looked at my bio section on Instagram or LinkedIn.

The first day after their offer was accepted and the contracts were drawn, I was out celebrating with friends and thinking about what I would wear to the Pulitzer Prize awards next year. The second day was less enthusiastic, as I had to sit down and revisit my story, trying to find the little gaps in it that a couple of thousand words could fit. I couldn’t, but that was okay, I was suffering a mild hangover anyway and the story was three years old, so it would take me some time to get back into that mindset, that world if you will.

But the next day was the same. And so was that whole week. By Sunday, I had bought two eBooks on story structure and had revisited some of the university ones I already owned. More talented people than me kept telling me all the things I did right. I had my character’s arc, middle, beginning, ending, all clear, a little hero’s journey packed into less than five thousand words that now had to somehow become at least eighty thousand. Anxiety kept circling me like a vulture that had just smelled rotting flesh.

The deadline was not due for another three months and even though I couldn’t find any way to lengthen my little story into a long one, ninety days seemed more than enough for me to figure it out. It was all going to work out for the best. It had to. Right?

***

Wrong. It was now three weeks before the deadline and I had become a master of giving elaborate excuses to my editor and publisher. On a particularly rainy night, as I was lying down on the floor with five books open around me and about a dozen closed ones that had already failed to help me, I decided that it was time for truly drastic measures.

One small part of my home library (if you could call home library a couple of overstocked IKEA shelves and boxes), was accommodating some obscure books about magic that my parents insisted I had to have, even just for the literary value in them. And in case I ever changed my mind and wanted to follow the family line of work. Of course, there were steps to follow and people to take lessons from if I ever thought of becoming a witch, but on a Sunday at one in the morning, not a lot of people are willing to share the hidden secrets of the universe with you.

I wanted, no, not wanted, I needed results, straight away. After all, I have spent the first eighteen years of my life with my parents and their friends, surely, I had picked some basic do’s and don'ts when it came to magic and its rules. I started searching the dusty books, looking at the new-age titles that made me cringe. We had “Kitchen Witchery 101”, “Tarot Decks, Runes, And Simple Spells For Beginner Witches”, “The Ways Of The Ancients”, “The Book They Don’t Want You To Know About”, and some other fancy titles that were sure to lure fifteen-year-old girls who were unpopular at school to buy them and try their revenge, only to figure out after a while that no, magic was not what they were thinking. It greatly annoyed me that my parents thought that my level of knowledge was down to this, but to be fair, I had spent my whole life complaining that I didn’t want anything to do with their craft.

As usually happens in times like these, the answer was waiting for me at the bottom of the pile. An actually old book with a worn leather-bound cover that was simply titled “Summoning”. Bingo.

To be honest, I had waited for my search to be long, confusing, and disappointing to the point of giving up, but apparently summoning your muse was a popular topic, so after three chapters which I only thumbed through, the instructions were there for me, ready to be used. I quickly realized that the spell would have to take place tomorrow, because I definitely did not have everything that I needed to cast it and I had to go shopping and/or scavenging for some of the materials, and also wait for the waning crescent moon, which, according to an online lunar calendar, would be tomorrow evening at its right phase.

***

The day passed in a blur of trying to extract info from my parents about shops that sell actual magical things and not fake ones without telling them what I planned to do, then deciding which shop would be cheaper to go to with an Uber, and then shopping for herbs and crystals, finding out that I had to visit a different one for feathers and dirt from one sacred place or another, and finally going back home just in time for the moon rise.

I cleansed the energy of my house by burning sage, my quickly made altar (which was my coffee table) with a palo santo stick, and finally the ingredients I was going to use with an incense stick. I also had a shower to cleanse myself from actual dirt, and I wore a black satin nightgown which I thought would be the most fitting under the circumstances. I was ready. The moon was ready. The ingredients were ready. Now I had to meditate for a bit, repeat the words in the book, and watch as my muse would come to visit me and hopefully help me start and finish my book in two weeks.

I did it. It felt… normal. A bit of cringe, a bit of hope, and a bit of outward feelings were involved, as I expected it would. I gave it time, I gave it energy, and I gave it the correct amount of passionate longing that I always heard is the main ingredient for magic to work. The result was… unexpected.

I had a vision. A stunning young lady came to me out of the dark, wearing a white himation in the ancient Greek style. She had a voice like a thousand lullabies, and she brought with her an air of spring that smelled like olives and wildflowers. She called my name. “I want you to help me write my book”, I answered, out of breath almost, marveling at the miracle in front of me. I had made it. I had summoned her. It was as easy as…

“Put word after word after word, until they don’t suck anymore.”, she said and vanished.

And that’s what I did. And then… It was Magic.