I WAKE UP AROUND 1PM and head to the donut shop on Summit st. I'm staying with one of the baristas that works there while I get back on my feet. They've been my friend since I first came to Seattle almost over 6 years ago. It's one of the few places I feel comfortable hanging out when I'm just killing time. It was so quiet and I never felt judged there. Soon after I made it my hangout the cafe staff started calling the place “Claudia's living room.” I job hunt on my beat up laptop while my friend gives me freebies all day. Then the night comes. My friends gets off work and we walk back to their place perchance to sleep and begin the cycle anew. I job hunt while they and their partner play video games from their bedroom. My phone rings. I take it outside.
I'll spare you the inane banter. Well, what do you know? I got the place. Why they picked me is anyone's guess. Maybe because if I went missing nobody would notice. Maybe they couldn't deal with me because I'm too real and had to give me the place out of fear. Either way I guess just for a moment it's not all doom and gloom. My therapist says that I “like to lose on [my] own terms.” I mess up the jump point for all my decisions and commitments. I view everything in life like that; not knowing if I'm jumping off in time to save myself or if I'm riding into danger. I have no one to guide me. Never knowing if I'm getting off the train too soon or too late, or if I'm just walking towards something better. This is it. The point of no return.
I pack my bags and catch the 60 down to Georgetown. We pass over the 12th Ave S bridge. The one with the view of the CenturyLink and SafeCo fields. I lost track of how many nights I worked load outs there, tearing apart stages and shoving huge speakers into trucks. God help anyone on those midnight ramp crews.
This is the part of Seattle the tourists never see. The poor, downtrodden parts. The real Seattle. Everything north of Pike st. is all peaches and cream. Living in Wallingford was safe and sound. Waiting in this part of town at 4am for the 49 or the light rail to start back up after a show was playing with fire. I kept my C-Wrench in my hand and was ready to knock out any meth head who came near me. The real Seattle starts where the techbros won't go.
We pass the endless tedium of Beacon Hill and down until I'm finally here. I get out just a block away from Georgetown Music. I want to go bar hopping but instead I drag my case to the house.
I open the door and Jer-Bear is waiting for me.
“Heeeeyyyyy” he groans. I haul my big ass case into the house with a lot of clunking. He doesn't bother to help me up the stairs as I lugged all my possessions step by step. No how's your day? Just dumps me at my new room so he can get back to watching TV with Gregory. It's kind of a breath of fresh air. No bullshit pleasantries required.
I sit alone in this small, cramped space they called a “room”. It's a glorified closet with a child's loft bed. I'm goddamn five foot eleven and weigh a hundred and fifty eight pounds. I've always been a big girl. I grew tall which pissed my little brother off. He wanted to be the big one and always being smaller than a girl chewed him out from the inside. I managed to make it into bed without dying or the cheap ikea furniture collapsing under my fat ass. I don't think about my size unless it's about the space I physically take up. My mind drifts to the place it always goes when I wind up somewhere new. It has a blank slate to imagine a new future. The one I won't fuck up this time. That's the addiction of always moving to new places. You briefly break free of yourself. Just for a tiny bit.
It's easy to see how a society of witches could operate in secret in Seattle. Everyone keeps to themselves. There are no real conversations, just an endless affair of small talk. You could know someone for years and never learn a thing about them. No one tells you about the missing stairs. One second someone's your friend, the next day they try to rape you and only a week later does everyone go “Oh yeah, Brian was a serial rapist. He has like 5 assault charges and went to prison for it.” No one will tell you anything until it's too late. Everyone has a short memory. Seattle keeps its secrets. It's a labyrinth of cold people who never share what they know. So anyone teaching you anything, especially as out there as magic, forget it.
I started off doing all the bullshit chores and tasks they gave me. Then came the actual initiation, which takes forever and a day. First was the diet. Vegan levels of strict. I would say it was a vegan diet but there was one exception. A single, loathsome animal I had to eat which tasted awful no matter how it was served. Tuns of guided meditation. My room stank of the myriad of magical incense I had to burn nonstop. None of this was Wicca Harry Potter shit. It was bootcamp and it had no semblance of what you think of as “witchcraft.” Most of all it was annoying and tedious.
At the heart of real witchcraft is secrets. Never tell anyone anything. So I sure as hell won't tell you how to get there but I'll share with you the one thing I can. A warning as to why you should never get into this crap. A little something to help discourage any aspiring witches from taking this path. It wasn't a deal breaker for me but I doubt many of you could swallow it. Literally. That one animal you have to eat? A huge part of initially gaining the ability to see and cast magic involves absorbing it. Like getting vitamins from health smoothies. Only the smoothies are made of other witches. I still stir my tea with a rib bone I got from a teenage witch who bit it too early.
Once your mind is ready and you've cannibalized enough witches to have some juice in you, you start seeing the world as it is. We make up bullshit to explain things away everyday. The shadows in the corner of the room, the horrors your cat reacts to, the abuse you pretend never happened. Once this shit has altered your mind and warped your body it's like the world has more color in it. Of course I never understood any of it cus I sure as hell never got any straight answers from my hosts. I'd ask lots of questions of Jer-Bear and Gregory and I'd get cryptic answers (Gregory) or jokes (Jer-Bear).
“How does magic work?” I'd slip into casual conversation with Gregory.
“When you were meditating with the juice in ya and all that jazz, your mind enters the liminal space. A kind of spiritual green room. Nature abhors a vacuum so magic seeps in. Well, that's how we jump start the engine anyway. The rest is pick your poison.”
Another time I asked Jer-Bear about if there were any rules.
“Ask me no secrets and I'll tell you no lies. Just don't take any oaths or swear anything to anyone or organization. We'll handle the fallout.”
“That's awful generous of y'all.” I wondered what the catch was.
“Eh, kangaroo ghost courts and angry CEOs be damned. Lots of people think they're some authority in this game. Anarchy, darling, that's what we're about. Except for the one rule. There are no rules and that's the rule.” Jer-Bear shrugged it off.
“Angry CEOs?” The fuck?
“How do ya think they got rich? They didn't pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Lol.” Did Jer-Bear seriously just say “lol” in casual conversion?
I got the message. All will be revealed if you shut up and do your job.
The Family. That's what this group is called. There are a whole bunch of gangs, cliques, and cabals in Seattle's witching scene. The one I joined is called The Family and The Family takes care of its own. If you count. Me, people like me, we're Family adjacent. Auxiliary Family. We take care of them and they, well, don't do shit for us. We only pick up their scraps and thank them for it.
If I had to name the exact moment I realized magic was real, as in fully and internalized, it came from an easy chore. One of the older members got a bad back and messed up hands so she had to be put in a home. She kept witching hours alright as she was up by 5 or 6pm usually. I'd go over to her place to do her dishes and clean up. Afterwards we'd spend an hour watching anime and we'd say our goodbyes. One night she takes me out back to her garden. She points to these orchids.
“They only bloom at night and only witches can see them. I'm always worried someone is gonna step on them. Aren't they beautiful?”
They glow. Orchids that glow and shift and move. Forget all my sixth sense bullshit and meditation. It was something as simple as looking at some flowers. After that, I took the headphones off when I walked around. I heard the things you can't hear, or you do and pretend you don't. See the small birds and animals you'd miss, or think was a blur in the corner of your eyes. I smell the flowers only witches can. Mundane people never see them, they don't see shit. Not just because these things are magical, it's because people always overlook the important things in life. The things that standout and can't be bought. The things that are never sold to you.
I'm not doing all these chores for free that's for sure. As I run errands and clean up for different members of The Family each one tutors me in something in return. That nice old disabled lady taught me how to see around bends and sometimes through doors, if it's a wood door and it's old enough.
One day this former model taught me how to control people's mind. You can't do it to a witch but on the average person it works. I usually brought sandwiches to her while she worked at home. That day she had a delivery man do it for me because she just wanted a buddy to watch movies with while she pretended to work. She has me take notes while she did it. You start small. I guised it in pity stories and social engineering so I wasn't just ordering someone around. Make an excuse why I can't pay for my coffee, bat my eyelashes, and I get it for free. Soon I was doing that with bus fare. Now I never pay for anything small. But there's a side effect. The more you do it the less those people remember you. Their minds can't handle the idea of being controlled so they black it out. The cognitive dissonance forces their brains to rewrite the experience. Part of the spell involves making it pleasant so they don't get a pavlovian response to it. But even if they like it and are smiling they block it and you out. I'm sure there's a downside. I just haven't found it yet.
There were too many chores and people to mention. Teleporting was another trick I got in exchange for helping someone move. They only taught me it to speed up getting furniture in and out of the van. Small distances, nothing to brag about. Most spells tend to be lackluster affairs. Another witch taught me to throw electricity around. They needed me to jump start a car battery for them. The spell is in such low amounts you could barely use it as a taser to get away from a fight. Everything you think would be superhero levels of power turned out to be parlor tricks. And I worked my ass off everyday being a go-for to get my hands on this gimmicky shit. Of course none of this prepares you for when they finally put you to use.
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