I have a bitter taste on my tongue.
It is 2 AM and my witch and I are looking at my old diaries.
“I’ve let it soak for too long”, I say, as I pour more sugar into my tea, and my witch giggles.
For most of my teenage years, I wrote very detailed diaries. I like to have books that had flowers embroidered on the front, and within their pages, I relived and discussed so many things. It was a good writing exercise! And these days, I am grateful for them, because I can reread them and remember things.
Just as I am doing now with my witch.
I hold a very old one in hand.
It was one of my last attempts to regularly write them, and the book has already lost its back.
“Maybe he was right”, I whisper, as I reread the words I had noted there.
My handwriting tells me that I had been very drunk at the time.
“The people who enter our lives in a dark time are never truly good for us. Words by J.”
I remembered the boy with the curly hair who once started to cry because I had asked him how he was doing. I remember trying to reach out for him, and comfort him, until he ran away in a panic attack.
I also remember myself crying, because someone else had broken my heart, and this curly boy sitting down next to me and tell me that I was not supposed to ever need something this much that it makes me cry. And I remember him holding me a whole night, only to then find out that he was dating a friend.
I also have to think of another friend, who wanted to help someone in trouble, only to do a very terrible thing. The trouble had been too close to his own and had his head melt away.
“Is it true?”, I ask my witch. “That when we’re not well, we cannot make a connection to another human being? Is all the dream of support and closeness wrong?”
My witch smiles sadly. “Not always.”
“But?”
She giggles even sadder. “Caring is tough. Those that care don’t end well.” Then she steals my bittersweet cup of tea away from me and drinks from it. “Caring for someone can remind them of their wound. Being offered help can hurt, if you were in need before but never had it.” She laughs. “Just imagine someone who has been in great pain for years to be shown that it does not have to be that way. What do they do with all these years?”
“So what now?”, I respond bitterly. “Become a person made of stone? Not caring, not noticing?”
Layla sighs. “No, I never said that the two of us were going to end well.”
I don’t ever want to stop caring, and that will be tough.
I cannot accept all the wrongs in the world.
I want the people around feel safe and well.
“I never thought to be attacked for that”, I admit to my witch.
Mistress witch writes 