Prompt: Look around the room and name the first ten items you see. Write about one of them.

I wanted to read the book because she had read it.  I always thought her to be so wise, so grounded and profound.  I wanted to protect her and be guided by her at the same time. 

Even though it has been years since I have had any such compulsion I can see her sitting on her large brown recliner as if it were hours ago.  Her feet planted on the ground, her face perpetually pink from the rosacea that spread like blush across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.  Most people I knew tried to hide something like that or distract from it with their hair.  

She had none.

She told me once that she was a monster and  I believed her.  To me she was a beautiful monster.  She made me believe in magic, angels and myself.  I felt like I was at home and whole in her arms. Safe enough to cry.  When we met I couldn’t cry.  If I did it was a short lived misting thing but around her it was a monsoon so tumultuous that it would leave me gasping for breath and grasping for her.

She used to laugh when I cried but when I would pull away from her I would see her own eyes wet. She used to pat my head and tell me it was going to be okay even if it wasn’t now it will be because I am a witch and a survivor, because I was a sword fashioned to both shine and slaughter.

I loved her.  I wonder if she knew that and further wonder if she knew how much I loved her.    She was the mother I always needed and the big sister I always wanted.  Sometimes we were both teenagers playing and plotting or grown ass women wielding double bladed axes against the world.  She was the mentor that I dreamed of as a child reading fantasy novels of wizards and dragons. What we were to each other shifted day to day, or hour by hour but what didn’t shift was a sense of balance between us.

Until one day that balance broke. Until  she or I or both tipped the scales or snapped the chains. I don’t know when it happened but I do know how it did.   There is a truth that all true teachers know and it is this.  If the medicine you give is to be good, valuable, potent and precious it must first pass through the filter of  yourself

She always told me that this path would kill me should I choose to walk it.  She said she would hold me through that death. But I ended up holding her through hers and watching helplessly as she actively clung to a life that was not for her. She told me to choose the sheer shroud  in order to gain the wisdom of the caul. While she herself took up an opaque veil to hide from the challenges that come with being reborn.

I would have followed her to hell and back but I could not follow her there.  I could not traverse streets lined with houses of gilded facades hiding decrepit roofs and faulty foundations.

She had taught me to walk with fire, to burn the village of myself to the ground and dance on the ashes of  who I thought I was in order to summon the truth of who and what I am.   So it was heartbreaking to watch her say one thing and do another.  Pull from the pool of herself and offer me sweet water to drink while she herself did not partake of her own oasis well.  

My last lesson from her was the most powerful. It was what she aimed to teach me in the first place, the full and blossomed fruit bearing tree of the seed she planted in my soul years before.

Become unbought

Know yourself and all your parts

Do not bow before others in ways that cheapen yourself 

All parts of those triune mysteries were present when I said no while she expected me to say yes.

It’s been years and there are so many things that she had given me that I got rid of or altered in some way but not that book.  It stays in the permanent position of the next one on my list.  Maybe one day I’ll read it and remember who we were then.   

Before the storm, before the burning of the village and the tears, but just after she grabbed my hands, looked me in my eyes and said  “Congratulations and I’m sorry because this is going to upend and change your life, forever.”