Bitchcraft

I see it happening in my mind, but sometimes my imagination gets a little ahead of me.

I’m not always one hundred per cent certain that the things I see unraveling behind my lids have in fact occurred, to me or to anyone for that matter. The line is blurred between the external reality and my internal one. Sometimes I think to myself that it is quite impossible that all of these events could have occurred to me. Some of them don’t even make sense; too impossible to be true. But then again, why would I imagine such mundane events, like brushing my teeth. Maybe those ones were real, they must’ve been.

People are so concerned with the unlikelihood, if not impossibility of time travel. I say- you are all fooling yourselves. Time travel is a commonly practiced phenomenon. We all time travel. We might not get into some time machine, set a date and move through space to travel to the past or future, like those movies we’ve all seen and watched in disbelief. But, be honest with yourself for a moment and think about whether you are currently living in the present. My mom, well, she lives in the past. Everyday she tells stories of the good old days. She strolls down memory lane, recounting the great moments of her youth. When she’s not strolling, she is dwelling; dwelling on the things she suffered from as a child that have led her to be the woman she is today. Oh, mom. Oh dear.

My sister Jane, she’s living in a whole other world. She lives for the future. No. She lives in the future. She has yet to take stock of how great she has it in life at present time. She is way too busy thinking about how she can make it better, bigger, greater… later. Others would die for what she has now; she’ll die never knowing that she always had the ‘it’ she’s in constant search of.

The foreign, if not alien concept of time travel, not so strange after all. Think about it this way: you might not be on a plane going somewhere, your body might not disappear right in front of your very eyes like it does in the movies, but think about it. Think about the fact that there are very few people who have mastered the art of living in the present. Soon someone will try to convince me that witchcraft doesn’t exist. Yeah right!

I most definitely do not live in the present. I don’t live in the past or future either. I live in my mind. Not deliberately. I wish I didn’t. Well, that’s not entirely true. I don’t know in which time period I wish to live; I’ve only always lived in my head. Physically, my body lives right here, in my house with my mother and sister, and of course, our little puppy. But mentally, I suffer from self-diagnosed dream travel. What that means is that I dream things while sleeping, or I imagine things while awake, I remember moments that may or may not have happened. This may seem quite lovely to some- I mean, the idea of being capable of dreaming up absolutely anything and then not being able to distinguish that it was just a daydream… yeah, it sounds surreal. I have the pleasure of making up beautiful memories and then actually believing that they occurred. I am currently struggling to find out whether I am in fact an angel. Or maybe my name is Angel. Trust me when I say this is becoming problematic.

Most think it’s pretty cool, but nobody realizes that I call it ‘suffering’ for a reason.

It’s hard not knowing the difference. It’s difficult not having control over what happens to me in my mental life. Some people have the ability to close their eyes and imagine a better situation, or shut their eyes, curl their lips upward, breathe in a long steady breath and ahhh, think about what could be and then try to make it happen. I don’t have that ability. I have no control over what happens when I close my eyes. The same way I don’t have any control over what happens in my physical life. I’m sure there is a real medical term for what I have- maybe I’m delusional, or just plain nuts. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. My psychologist is trying to convince me that I have a craft I should hone in on and try to gain more control of. Basically, he thinks I’m cray cray, but he wants to me to believe that it’s a cool thing.

Maybe I do have a craft – bitchcraft. And maybe I am not the only one who sees that gunman behind me holding up a riffle shooting at a deer in the forest. Or maybe I am the only one who sees it.

Ok fine. Whatever. I’m crazy.

(ART by CLIO LUNIA)