Toil & Trouble

This is the truest thing I know. Scars are nothing to hate, they are nothing to deny. They serve as our proof of what we survived, and there is nothing more beautiful than to have survived something.

I can almost never say what I'm thinking at any given moment. I would have been stabbed to death years ago.

What I am certain of is that there's something wonky going on beneath the surface of what we call reality. Things are not as they appear. They are much, much more.

The decided mind is a closed mind. A closed mind can keep you separated from the ultimate truth.

Whenever you lose something of great value, it’s important to focus on its value to you and not on the loss of it.

And if I said "because I'm a witch," they'd think I was crazy.' 'That's exactly right,' she confirmed. 'Because everybody knows witches aren't real.' She nodded. 'Yes.' 'Except they really are real.' She continued nodding. 'Mm-hmm.' 'But you also told me Santa and the tooth fairy were real.' 'Those were lies,' she said. 'But they're lies every parent tells their children. So they're not really lies so much as a script.' 'I slept with teeth under my pillow, so it seems like a lie to me.

I like the bad one better,' I said. 'She had flying monkeys, and the good one was tacky and seemed kind of dumb.

He likes things that make sense, and this word explains everything he knows about me. It makes perfect sense. Unless you don't know me, in which case it's delusional, irrational, and absurd.

I try on the absurdly skinny threadbare designer jeans and almost begin to sob when I can button them. I have come full circle. Or maybe I’m the snake that perpetually eats itself, but here’s what I mean: I no longer have my life stretched before me, where anything is possible. I am facing joint replacement, mental decline, the shriveling, wilting decay of old age. But I face it wearing the exact same jeans I wore when I was seventeen and felt electricity flash and slide along my skin, when I burned inside to make something of myself, something big, something loud and powerful and strong, something you couldn’t look away from or ignore.

My youth is gone, but something far better has taken its place.

This is the right house and the right life, but it’s weird because I’ve never had a home before; I’ve had addresses.

Oh my God, I think. I envy people who are so easygoing, but I also don't understand them at all.

And possibility was my fuel. It was the One Thing that prevented me from slitting my wrists on any given horrid day. The fact that at any moment, everything could change.

He sees the shit that happens around me - or because of me - so now he is only 99.99 percent certain I can't turn him into a frog.

The thing is, I wouldn't believe in them, and I would privately ridicule any idiot who did, except for one thing: I am a witch.

We live in a physical world where the mere act of observation alone is enough to alter that which is observed, to change it from one form of matter into another. What is that if not magick?

Sometimes you know something is going to happen, even though they are ample opportunities to prevent it. Even though you don't want it, you know it's inevitable.

No, this is what has suddenly consumed me: if something were to happen on the island of Manhattan, the fact that we are, indeed, on an island would suddenly become a deep and terrible problem. I am wholly unequipped for a disaster. Vulnerable. The safety in numbers I had always felt in the city was an illusion. All those numbers could turn against each other under the right circumstances.

By the late '60s society was no longer afraid of witches, because people no longer believed in them. They were already worshipping the newfangled office computers and LED watches. Therefore, TV executives could create sexy witches and mischievious witches, not to mention male witches they called warlocks and put them in front of the nation. Except it seemed that people really did believe in witches, which was a little bit spooky and threatening, so the cute witches also had to be made powerless. Even though every rational person knew witches weren't real, a primal, tiny voice asked, Were they?

I know that under the best, lowest-stress circumstances I am an absolute horror to live with, a halogen-illuminated fountain of anxiety, control, and catastrophe. Mental health would be nice, but there’s not time for that, so I do the next best thing: on a walk along the Hudson to loosen the phlegm in my chest, I stop at a deli and pick up a sack of twelve oversized butter cookies with multicolored sprinkles.

Scars are nothing to hate, they are nothing to deny. They serve as our proof of what we’ve survived, and there is nothing more beautiful than to have survived something.

I absolutely hate being strapped down and buckled to my own words.