3/16/23, 5pm
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A voice.
A voice I know.
But, she sounds older.
And, she’s singing…
“Spent all your summers in England… Such a naughty boy…”
The voice of the Witch – but…. not. Much younger.
I look and see – it is the “young” girl, the one who hid under the Witch’s cloak, but…. now grown up, somehow. Matured. And… (surprisingly)…. alive….Her dark hair, long and curly, unmatted; her head uninjured.
I stepped towards the girl (now a woman)
“Where is she?” I asked, knowing that she understood as to whom I was referencing
“Gone,” she replied.
“Gone?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Gone. She…. left. I am here now.”
Something about that last line didn’t sit quite right with me and I wasn’t exactly sure why.
“…. I see,” I simply say.
And she looked at me with ever-watching suspicious eyes to see if I was lying, and she saw laying deep within them the truth that she had not won my trust.
“YOUR trust?” She said with a chuff. “Ha…”
She dropped her head and reaching into her satchel turned towards the cauldron and extended her arm over the bubbling mixture, sprinkling herbs and small chunky chips of unknown mystery into the pot.
It smelled, like…. mint…. or, eucalyptus…
And upon smelling this she took on the form of a Middle Eastern beauty, ancient and Negev and veiled, immaculate and gorgeous, bejeweled and naked and covered in draped see-through silk; salvation.
Her eyes….. so deep….
She looked into me and never stopped as she approached me, deeper and deeper with every single step, vibrations and frequencies reverberating and pulsating in the air around us as she neared, and she came close, staring into my face, and asked, – “If I tell you more, will you love me still?“
With mustard seed of joy and a bag of painful associations the memory of breakfast on a beach** entered my mind and I looked into her and said: “You know, oh Lord, that I love you.“
And a tear, in her eye (her right one), appeared and formed and rounded into a drop and before dripping turned into a crystal, small and pristine, and it just sat there a while, gleaming, glistening, glowing with sparks of light.
And we stared at each other for a bit.
And after a while, she said, “OK. That’s about all I can handle for one day.“ And she turned, beginning to leave.
As she turned away I said, playful and genuinely curious, “How many [of your days] are in my day?“
She stopped, slowly turned back towards me, turned her head and looked back into me with a cosmic smile and said, “Thousands.”
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** = Cf. John 21:14-25
