He sat at the same round table as I. I noted he had placed his chair at a relative angle of 135° from my own. I would not have noticed except he quietly fussed a bit to sit precisely where he wanted to sit and measured where to sit by glancing at me.
I said nothing and only nodded a polite silent greeting. We were sitting in public, at a coffee shop somewhere in the world. I was playing a card game with one of my tarot decks. A very serious play, I assure you.
He took out a notebook and pen and started writing quick and furious notes. Maybe he’s a sketch artist. Maybe a poet. Maybe I didn’t care as long as he left me in peace.
“You disappoint me.”
So much for peace.
I laid a black faced card over a blue faced card. The color combination told me to remain silent for now. When I showed no sign of even hearing the complaint, he slapped his pen and notebook on the table to get my attention.
“Don’t fucking play at being mysterious! I’m talking to you! There is no one else here! You may have fooled [Tumblr] but I know who you are and what you are not!”
A red card now obscured the black. “Have we met?”
He snorted and leaned back in his chair. His body posture assumed mastery over a field not yet defined. “Formally? No. But I know you. I have followed you from the first post you made. I have compared your slips and broken blinds and now I know you. And I’m disgusted as hell.”
A yellow card was laid off to the side. “If we have not formally met, and I have not given you private insights into my life, then what are you upset about? I have never withheld the fact that I do not reveal everything to my readers. Just as I have never withheld my disdain for people who think they have a right to me because they read my posts.”
He snatched up his pen and notebook again. Flipping through several pages of what he muttered was cross referenced evidence, he arrived at the core of his argument and the damning words at me.
“I took you for a bruja! I took you for a witch of the old ways, of the paths that were before white people scattered it! I took you for a mystic of old gods and older forces!”
A white card was held in my hand. It was not to be played on the table just yet. “And who the fuck told you that?”
“YOU DID!”
“Show me where I claimed to be a bruja. No soy de sangre vieja. Mis padres y sus padres no son de la sangre misma. Mis ancestros son dispersado como las estrellas en la noche y los polvos en el viento. Y digame una cosa. ¿Quién te dijo que soy bruja? ¿Quién mintió a ti?” [I am not of old blood. My parents and their parents are not of the same blood. My ancestors are scattered like the stars in the night and the dust on the wind. So tell me. Who told you I’m a bruja? Who lied to you?]
I kept the white card in my hand and laid another black card on the table. He stared furiously in his notebook as if by will alone he could bring forth evidence to condemn me.
He slapped the notebook closed and slammed it back on the table. “You didn’t. Not directly. But you insinuated. Oh, how you insinuated! You made references to things that burned in my bones and made me wonder what powers you kept hidden. You posted about gods you shouldn’t even know and about experiences you shouldn’t have had unless you were an old country witch.”
“Define ‘old country’.” I pulled a yellow card from my hand and matched it to a yellow card on the table. Both were discarded as a pair. “For that matter, define ‘witch’. If you have been following closely, then you should know I haven’t claimed that label for myself for years. I’m no witch. Not by action, belief, or bloodline. And certainly not by my will.”
I laid the white card on the table before he could speak. The action took the breath from his lungs, giving me another chance to speak without interruption. “And another thing. Bruja means something very, very specific. Which is why I never claimed it or even tiptoed around it. I don’t know one one-hundredth of the information required to be a proper bruja. Not las canciones. Not las hierbas. Neither los diablos nor los ángeles. Not los santos católicos, los espíritus viejos, o la santa más sagrada cuyo nombre no puedo hablar. None of it. I barely even know fucking Spanish for fuck’s sake. And let’s not even go near the biggest fucking stumbling block. I don’t have a community to be a bruja for. Not even for coin. So what the fuck pedestal you have put me on against my will is your fucking problem. Not mine.”
I scooped up my cards and tapped them into a deck in my hands. He sat quiet, still at 135° to my right. His face reddened as he held back tears, even as his nose ran furiously to catch up with his emotions.
“I believed in you.” His quiet assertion attempted to stab my conscious.
“You believed in what you wanted to see.” His impotent guilt returned to him with more success than it had against me.
“I believed in what you wanted for yourself.”
I didn’t realize I had been tapping the deck against the table until I stopped at this moment. “You believed in what you thought I wanted for myself. In what you wanted me to want for myself. In a personalized mannequin that wanted what you wanted.”
“I…”
I turned away from him and put the deck away in my bag, speaking as I moved. “What you want from me doesn’t matter. I don’t care what your expectation is. Have we contracted with each other for a mutually desired outcome? Have I stolen from you and placed myself in your debt? What have I done that gives you the right to force me to account for my life?”
He put his pen and notebook away. “What you did… was make us care about you. You gave us a persona we could believe in. A story we could hitch our own dreams onto. And now you’ve left us, and all we have is the stories you told. There is nothing new to you. If there was anything to you at all?”
I stood up. “Bullshit. Who gave you a mummified nutsack and called it Amanita? That’s it. I’m out. I’m not a bruja, not a witch, not a wise woman, a cunning woman, or any of your fancy names that have been ground into homogenous, sifted, and organza wrapped powders for sale. This is going to run in circles, and I have fucking work in the morning.”
I put the strap to my satchel over my shoulder and pushed my chair close to the table. “Here’s some wooish advice for you. Don’t depend on other people to make your dreams come true. Or you’ll wind up their blinded and bound servant.”
As I walked away from the table, I noted that somehow its orientation had changed. Where before I sat at 0° and he sat 135° in relation to me, he now sat at 0°. But only the whispers that spoke what he secretly wanted of me circled the table.