Secret Letter

The year is 2000, I had been two years out of my brain surgery, and I was well into my third year of Elementary School when shit hit the fan. It was a Tuesday mid-morning on the playground when all of this took place. It was my first real year where my brain had grabbed what had happened to it and could microfunction what was both at school on campus and out of school off campus without feeling so overwhelmed by the impact of the surgery. Life had barely started for me, and everything about it was turning around.

It was the first recess of the day when I fell into my tunnel and began networking what was happening around me, something I had done every day since returning to school after the shock had worn off. I first noticed tunnel-verse when I was in first grade. I had asked Hogen if I could use the bathroom, and she had said yes. I had gone to the bathroom, looked in the mirror, acknowledged the windows, and even washed my hands, but when I came back from all of that, she was taken aback and told me she never said I could use the bathroom.

This time was different, though, I thought as I sat on the white cobblestone bench inside the chain-linked barricaded grassy area on the big kid side of the playground. Something about today had felt off. I wasn't exactly myself, but I didn't feel unsafe in it. I sat there, gentle, looking down at the metal circle in the center of the table and followed the patterns in words as they erpted outward past the metal circle into the chaos of the cobblestone. A low buzzing itched behind my ear as children played and screamed in excitement. I rubbed the roof of my mouth with my tongue achingly as the rocks danced on the tabletop where I was sitting. I was having my routine panic attack following a flashback sequence to a memory that wasn't mine to hold onto anymore. This is what I had learned in my tunnel-verse and what I continue to learn now, twenty-seven years after the fact.

Flash forward to 2020. I'm 27, like most year of the Monkeys are, and the planet around me is about to shut down. I hadn't been having a good time in life since starting my weed journey in 2016, and I was starting to hate being home, so the thought of being stuck at home because of an airborne pathogen felt like a punishment from God. I took that time to reflect on what it was that I had been doing with my life up until that point, and got off social media. That was that, or so I thought. I had, along with many young individuals, fallen into a coping process that many call Witchcraft.

Even now, writing it down as such it feels like saying the name Voldemort in Hogsmeed.

It's because it's been a little over five years since my decision to explore the craft, and I only talk about the side effects of what it was that I had endured along the way with my doctors (or try to), that I hesitate to even call it Witchcraft. Because truth be told, I do have a head injury that I am still healing from that rocked my world in not one but several different ways, and introducing an abstract concept like witchcraft doesn't seem accurate or fair to me, but it was 2020, times were difficult, and I needed off the marijuana.

The day was March 27, 2020; this will be the last time it registers that my best friend and I were ever friends. I'm sitting at home watching the final episode of Steven Universe, taking notes to write a review about later, when I decide I've had enough. The world was on the cusp of shutting down and I was starting to have a nervous breakdown because I mirrored a cartoon character who turned into a giant pink lizard monster after a herrowing week of breaking down one by one in seemingly ordinary ways.

Only now realizing that that may have been a benefactor to my downfall in February of 2022, almost a year after my Witchcraft journey had started, a year and eleven months after losing my best friend, and a year and ten months after the world shut down officially.

When I was in fourth grade, way back in 2002, I broke my foot walking from my parents' bedroom into the hall, I tripped over a soccer cleat I hadn't yet put away and tumbled across the carpet into the cold drywall. I remember the soft heartache I felt as my ears captured the silent snap that engulfed my very being when I tried to stand back up again. Weeks after, I was fresh in a boot, trying and failing to get to my Science Period class.

That's what they did back then to prepare us for middle and high school; they blocked off one section of the curriculum and had us take that course for a few weeks in another classroom. It was my favorite time of the week, not because I got to leave class, but because I got to do Science. Anyway, I was rushing to my science period when I tripped over a chair and fell face-first onto the hardwood floor beneath my feet. Something I hadn't done since first grade at the mall shortly after being released from the hospital. I don't remember how badly that felt. I just remember it hurt badly. It hurt, and I could not see.

That's what it was like in February 2021 as I lay there in the Emergency Room Hospital bed, screaming, "I am LOKI!" while flailing my arms and legs. Something I'm sure in today's day and age would have wound up on YouTube or TikTok. It was a horrifying sight, and I just remember being so angry and confused, tired and scared. Intrigued and a little absorbent to what I was seeing, hearing, and feeling in what I could only describe to you now, four and a half years after the fact, as dying. I was dying. And nothing interested and scared me more.

Part 2 Coming