About all the wrong moments in time

The moment when something is wrong likes to arrive with a drumming. A deep and sudden drumming that can be felt deep in the stomach … Or even only there?

I have been close to writing the first moment in the life of my witch when something was seriously wrong, but something kept me from actually writing myself there. I am not sure why I hesitate. I made her up … sorry, I mean, of course, I summoned her to explore all these things. These things that happen in this world and which I am was not able to translate into the mind I encounter them with.

But what kind of things exactly?
The list of worst case scenarios I have come up with at some point in my life is very long. Actually, even only focusing on the past two years would make up countless of horror stories and tragedies to make a head explode without actually really happening. But even without happening, they feel so very real. It‘s the drumming in the stomach, the thunder with which a certain thought is arriving, and the sudden but very certain knowledge that this will become true, so very true.

Thinking of my witch, I see bloody sheets. I see bloody and sweaty sheets, and her in between, and I kind of still picture her as pretty although almost dead. I also picture hope. Hope that once enlightened faces suddenly vanishing, and although the pain has been unbearable for far too long, my witch still has hope and her whole body cramps and protests in the attempt to keep the drumming moment away while it is already arriving.

Why the drums?

Well, when I was a teenager I watched too many hospital shows, I guess. Really the wrong thing to do for someone with an own medical trauma and a phobia of doctors already, but it was kind of tempting, because brains are funny. So, there the drums belong into a good story. The energetic young woman or the couple deeply in love leaving their doctors with message they never wanted to deliver – those stories always have drums! You might get so used to them that you expect the drums as soon as anything good happens. Meeting someone new? Oh, where are the drums …

My witch witnessed these drumming moments for people she loved.
She also turned into the person waking up those drums and causing the shocked and disturbed expression on those faces around her, and she knows how it hurts to be the reason for this. To be a possible tale turned to dust.
That is the worst part of this! Versions of yourself, or of a life, which are suddenly falling apart.
My witch thought that she could be a mother, an efficient 17th century wife, but the tearing apart of her insides revealed a different future for her. I am working for a museum and am teaching children and so need to finish my degree for the future I wish for that my last exams are driving me crazy.

While I am writing about the tale my witch had to bury, I think about all the moments in which I thought I had to bury mine. Or, rather versions of mine which I thought I had lost. I remember waking up in the middle of the night thinking I had forgotten to attend an exam I had been preparing for, or I had lost the script I needed to study. I remember gasping as soon as my phone rang and expecting to be told that I was gonna die, only because a physician had taken a blood sample weeks ago. And in thought of my witch, even thinking of my gynecologist makes me feel infertile (yes, I can feel it!).
The problem with these moments is that somewhere these scenarios are happening right now. They are not impossible, just unlikely, but at some point, something unlikely will always happen. Some bad news will arrive, at some point in the future. Someone will get ill, or die. Something worked for will not be accomplished. No life ever happens without these incidents and I just have to remind myself that I will not experience all of them, and definitely not all at once and they don‘t have to be the end of the world.
Why am I having these thoughts?
Because I am finally about to take the very last exam of my special education degree. Everything else, including my thesis, has already been done and passed. Only one oral exam is left, and it is driving me crazy. The whole final phase of my studies took me longer, given the pandemic and the reorganizing of everything I had been working on before, and I am still not used to be working this isolated alone from home. I am still not sure about where to find the right kind of energy, the strength to do it, and I am making up horror stories in my head once more. The professor looking at me and sensing my lack of competence, all of my struggles. The knowledge to just leak out of my brain …

„You just want him to love you“, my witch giggles from behind and I am confused.
„That‘s your problem with the authorities“, she continues amused. „We want them to love us, or else we‘re scared of them.“

She has a point. I need the personal level to work out to be able to deal with a thing, in this case a simple question-answer-situation. And personal levels have changed so much in the past two years.

After the drumming, we may be left with the question of who we could possibly be with this tale turned to dust.