Bitter Sweet

I was born a witch. But until my late teens, I didn’t know. My family couldn’t have guessed because some of them don’t believe in witches, and others are so afraid of them that they deny their existence. So, some of them didn’t believe in me, and some even denied my existence, which deeply affected my entire life.

As a child, I was pure-hearted, always there for others, a fair player, a great fighter for justice and truth. But the childhood of a witch is very difficult.

I remember, when I was five years old, my father sat me on his lap, asking me to choose seven lottery numbers out of fifty. I’d only just learned to count to ten, so I began reciting, “One, two, three, four, five…” Angered, he pushed me off his lap. I remember that, out of pain for his harsh treatment, I wished that not one of his lottery tickets would win.

And then, for the first time, I felt a sensation that would follow me all my life: my body felt like it was burning on a bonfire. My father forbade loud noises in the house, so I endured the pain in silence, suppressing my emotions, thoughts, and body, enduring my first taste of burning alive. Luckily, it quickly passed. But as I grew older, this sensation returned more frequently, lingering each time with an unbearable pain.

Five days later, we were all sitting in the living room when the lottery announcer began, to everyone’s shock, listing the numbers: “One, two, three, four, five…” I remember feeling sorry at that moment; I would have been happy if my father had been happy.

Another memory, bitter as it is vivid, is of my math teacher. He’d slap us if a pencil fell off the desk, as he took it as a sign we were playing and not paying attention, so a slap was “well-deserved.” One day, he called my mother in, angrily venting, “I don’t know what to do with her! She’s more restless than any child in the class. When I arrive, she’s either running across desks with the boys or standing at the door, warning them, ‘Here he comes!’ She whispers loudly, ‘He’s here!’ Listen mam, if I ever have a heart attack, it’ll be because of her.” I don’t remember my mother scolding me or putting me under any punishment. For us, that wasn’t mischief but cheerfulness.

Three days later, on my way to school, I ran into my older brother, who loved teasing me. Laughing, he pointed at me shouting, “Ha ha, you killed the math teacher!” He laughed because it seemed impossible, but I was paralyzed with fear, my eyes full of tears, asking what he meant. “Your teacher had a heart attack this morning, you fool. Didn’t you hear?” he said, trying to stop himself from laughing. Right there, in the middle of the street, I felt the flames rise again, and I screamed, crying, overwhelmed with guilt. That horror left a deep sense of guilt in me, or rather, it just intensified the one already there.

The next “coincidence” was even worse. When I was nine, my geography teacher asked me a simple question: Which countries border ours? I didn’t understand geography at all. My brother had tried to help by telling me just to look at colors and lines, but for me, there were too many colors and lines.  When the teacher asked me which countries bordered ours, I followed “some” line, and my answer divided my country into six different countries, which triggered her wrath. Except…

Six months later, a terrible, four-year war erupted, and the country fractured along those very lines. My mother used to joke that I was the only one who knew it in advance, but I started to feel fear, an addition to the one that already filled me, and I avoided people, afraid that I might accidentally do something harmful to someone, especially since I didn’t understand whether or how I might have had any connection to these tragedies. Decades later, a therapist was astonished that I feared harming others more than myself. “A rare case,” she called it. Nightmares drove me to therapy, as every tragedy I read or heard of became, in my dreams, my doing—plane crashes, derailed trains, floods, fires…

I retreated into books, shutting out the news. Hemingway surely couldn’t comfort me, nor Bukowski or Fante, and Dostoevsky’s lovely descriptions couldn’t ease my dread. But Kafka, Beckett, and Camus, with their glimpses of the absurd, helped me discover the absurd and consider that all my fears were merely products of my imagination. I found peace. That is, until my first love—a definite trigger for a witch.

My first relationship was, we both agree to this day, a dream come true. The trouble occurred when it ended. We never stopped thinking of each other, though the nature of our love shifted over time from that of teenage years. Now, we hold each other in our hearts in a place reserved for family. And it was he who finally helped me realize that I was indeed a witch.

Two years after we split, I called him, unable to endure longer. He picked up, sounding shocked, and asked to meet, as he needed my help and our conversation. Of course, I agreed. He told me he’d visited a fortune-teller who claimed an ex-girlfriend had cast a spell on him, and that he would never be able to marry because of it. I could tell it truly unsettled him. She also said he would dream of that girl that very night. “I don’t remember what I dreamed. I only know my dad told me I screamed through the night, trapped in nightmares. But in the morning, after two years of silence, the first call I received was from you. Do you understand why I’m worried?” he told me, completely frightened, and since there had never been any conventions in our conversations, he asked me directly. “Tell me honestly, did you put a spell on me?”

A wave of emotions hit me—shock, concern for him, fear from the story itself.  My mind racedto figure out what might be behind it all... After a quick but deep reflection, I answered him as honestly as always, the only way I knew how: “I don’t believe in spells. So they’ve never interested me, and I have no knowledge of how they’re performed.” Then, truth flashed out from me like a spark, not expecting a revelation. “But,” I emphasized, “I must admit, while we were together, not a second passed without me, with all my will and strength, wishing you would love me for the rest of your life. If that’s enough to create a spell, then yes, I did it.” I, I, I, I... echoed in our minds, bound as we were. I sat there, paralyzed, while he sat in realization, and we both understood that yes, it was me. And me- was a witch.

With only the best intentions, without questioning my lifelong love for him, a love that undeniably endures, and merely wishing that he would love me for life, I had deprived him of the ability to love anyone else. Thoughts raced of other men who’d confessed they couldn’t love anyone after me. It finally made sense. I am a witch, and my power is that my wishes, if I wish them strongly enough, come true. Did I wrote “power”? A curse.

“How could I have done this? Could it really be? These people, did they deserve such a fate? All because of my desires, my thoughts. I don’t do it on purpose. I don’t want this! Or do I...? My intentions are pure, but this is beyond my control. How do I escape this curse?

My conscience forced me into submission. ““I would never again wish anything for anyone else—only for myself. I would learn to control myself, learn who I am, focus on my own life, I will ignore injustice, ignore lies. But how?! These things hurt! Yet it hurts you more when others hurt, doesn’t it? Yes! Then focus on yourself and forget the darkness. It’s not for you to change it. You, just be unconditionally good.”

But was that possible? Could a person be unconditionally good in a corrupted world full of evil? That question hunted me for years.

As I grew aware that I possessed the power to destroy evil but had no right to do so, it lowered my tolerance to stress drastically. I fought to contain my thoughts whenever I heard a horrible mother scolding her child, felt sick whenever I saw someone throw a stone at a dog, my spine ached whenever I heard awful slurs against people’s race, faith, or nationality... Finally I drowned in goodness, suffocating under the weight of restraint. I began to experience panic attacks, which kept me in fear, depression, and isolation for eight years.

But isolation has always suited me, so in those years, through reading, research, and deep introspection, I found my footing again.

Once I accepted my nature as a witch and mastered silence and good intentions, I began to “bloom,”- as did those around me. Friends became dependent on my presence. “When I’m at my worst, you change my perspective with a single sentence, and I instantly feel better,” they’d say. Lovers, too, flourished, started looking younger, fixing up their homes, changed their looks for better, saying, “With you, I finally feel like I’m enough, just as I am.” My colleagues would regularly request to work only with me. “I feel safe. I know you have control over the entire job and care for all of us.” Management was satisfied with the successful employee who could carry the entire company on her shoulders, an employee who was silent and did her job. On the streets, even if there were two hundred people—a child, a woman, a dog, a car... They all, as if instinctively knowing, would make their way through the crowd to find me, seeking help.  That decade finally brought me satisfaction. In my presence, people were well, and I didn’t even have to use my powers. It was enough to be who I was—a witch. It seemed like it was truly possible to be endlessly good.

But the next decade would reveal the truth.

I married a man who used my goodness against me, making me work more and earn more, as he did nothing. He took my money, spent it, always demanding more. The panic attacks returned, especially when I thought, “If I wish hard enough, I’ll leave him as a homeless man on the street!”

Whenever such a thought occurred, I would rush to the nearby forest and walk barefoot among the trees and moss, already knowing that it was the only way to “extinguish the burning bonfire.” By moonlight, I would walk barefoot through the woods, with the cold wind caressing my face, humming a lullaby I had learned as a child. That bond with nature helped me regain control over my emotions, freeing myself quietly from the energy that was about to strike those who had harm me.

I left him. He married a waitress of mine. “If I only wish hard enough, his young bride will give him back what he did to me.” Fleeing to nature.

Immediately after the divorce, my best friend felt envious that I had “managed to escape,” while she hadn’t, and started addressing me with horrible insults, humiliation, and anger. Although somewhat exhausted, I tried to be there for her, but it was never enough. Finally, she said, “No one has ever treated me better than you. That’s not the problem. You… you, I don’t like.” She had drained the last ounce of kindness I had for her. “If I just wished hard enough for her to ‘open her eyes,’ she wouldn’t survive what she saw.” The burning bonfire, moss, and bare feet.

To another friend, my positive energy, mixed with her negativity, didn’t suit her, so she too started with insults. Meanwhile, I knew every detail of her daily life, yet she didn’t know where I lived after the divorce. Again, no reciprocation, but an expectation of my complete devotion. “If I only revealed what her loved ones truly thought of her and how ugly she now looked on the inside, she’d shed a few tears.” Fire, forest.

One by one, friends performed their rituals of betrayal, trying to nullify me out of dissatisfaction because I no longer gave as much, leaving me drained and spent. I blamed myself. Again, I blamed myself. “What am I doing wrong? I’d give them everything, yet I’m always the bad one, and it’s never enough. I don’t want to believe that goodness doesn’t return goodness! What is it in me that provokes them to act like this? I’ll suffocate, I’ll disappear if I don’t start fighting for myself, but if I start, I’ll hurt them all.”

Then, the final drop of my kindness was drained. Only a fool silently accepts any order given. The firm’s management began assigning me tasks beyond my role, piling their own responsibilities onto me. Coworkers never wondered if I could handle being the sole pillar, and never offered help. Everyone took; no one gave. And when I withdrew, and started to refuse orders, doing only my own work, management started stripping away my benefits, reducing my rights, filling false complaints, threatening me with termination… Finally, they succeeded. Without a trace of empathy, they had burned me at the bonfire, united.

The flames blazed, the air thickened, and stars whirled frenetically around me. The world seemed to wait, poised for my sentence.

Did you know witches can have breakdowns? Did you know they are made of flesh and blood same as you? With their own joys, sorrows, hopes, and dreams. Their health. This witch, trying to please everyone, collapsed on the floor of her apartment, drained, unable to get up or speak. For days.

And if you ever wondered—no, it’s not possible to be unconditionally good. This thought weighed heavily on me as I finally stood again.

You see, goodness doesn’t return goodness, but evil does return evil.

“To burn down the house I’d left to my ex-husband, and him inside it? To set fire to the firm with all its employees locked in? To take away the voice of one friend and condemn another to a lifetime in a psychiatric ward?”

For just a millisecond, I felt something worse than the flames—a primal urge that obscured all thought and blinded my reason. It was a sensation that prefaces brutal revenge, searingly unpleasant. But in the next moment, gasping and terrified of the power within me, I made my choice: “If evil is returned with evil, revenge is out of the question. I would lose myself and every last shred of my goodness.” This decision brought me some peace, though the urge for revenge lingered.

“How can I remain good if I have the power to destroy? How can I learn to love a world that uses and crushes me and still keep my kindness? Being a witch torn between two sides seems harder than choosing only good or evil,” I thought, weary of the knowledge that evil roams free without remorse. I craved simplicity, still dissatisfied that evil people freely walk around us without a shred of conscience. My thoughts drifted from one side to the other until one of them crystallized and seemed like the right solution. “I’ll make them all disappear as if they never existed. Especially from others’ memories, because I don’t want their loved ones to suffer. And not only those who hurt me. I will prove my goodness by protecting every good soul on earth, too. I’ll traverse the world and make all evil vanish.” For me, this offered the feeling that in using my power to protect humanity with goodness lay the ultimate satisfaction and fulfillment of the need to do good. Their disappearance sounded like a blessing to humanity, not an inappropriate assumption of God’s role as judge.

I dressed in my finest black gown, and set out. I traveled the world—not once, but seven times—only to find that each time new sprigs of evil have emerged that simply couldn’t be destroyed.

Now, as a seasoned witch, I finally understood that evil, like good, must exist. “To savor the sweet, you must taste the bitter.” True goodness and justice come from embracing humanity in all its flaws.

And thus, the answer to the question, “Can one be unconditionally good?” is complex, layered. True goodness lies not in being absolute, but in the sincere effort to uphold it, even in an imperfect world.

This witch has found her peace in that knowledge.

Upon returning from my last journey, that night, I went to the Moon Lake, swimming in its cold waters, while the stars illuminated my bare body, twirling, spinning, and enjoying. When I stepped out, I lifted my black dress, heavy with bitter memories, and let it drift down the river, whispering, “Live and let live.” I donned white and returned home, where, alone—without a man, family, or friends—I enjoy my good intentions, even when life is hard.

And those who harbor evil- I’ve learned how to make them disappear just for me, holding to the hope that, in the end, there will be a judge who rewards and punishes as we deserve.