Silence is a lighter, and a knife. Two things touching, then touching skin, with no answer. 6 or 7 times, I think, though I wasn’t really counting at the time. The point of the knife on the left, then the right, leaving a jagged little crescent of annihilated flesh. It’s a little uneven, the blade slipped over a little bit on the right.
It wasn’t a cry for help, it wasn’t really any kind of self-harm. No one would have believed me at the time, but it was winter and long sleeves conceal all manner of sins. And then time had passed and I’d convinced myself I hadn’t gone off the deep end and I didn’t really give a shit what they thought anymore.
Funny, people barely ever even notice anymore. I forget, sometimes, that it’s there, but I’m always glad when I remember. Didn’t heal the way I thought a burn scar would, but I love it all the same - my little cicatrix. It changes color in the cold, when the blood vessels contract.
Of course, the pain was ridiculous. But pain isn’t always a bad thing, hurting is good and right, sometimes.
…
It was the worst thing he’d ever said to me. In a long, storied friendship of backstabbing and casual betrayal, after years of promises and apologies. We never really liked each other that much, but at the end of the day when everyone else was gone the two of us were always left.
But I was done with him, after that. I was moving across the fucking country in a couple days. We’d gathered in his backyard, us and the handful of friends and friend-of-friends, sitting in the dark around this pittering little piece of a campfire. It was a big moment, the kind that makes you talk about all the shit that usually stays buried. The kind that convinces you that, if you’re ever going to let your guard down, just once, now’s the time to do it - now’s the time to stop pretending and just be yourself with the people who matter to you.
It didn’t matter, really, what I said or what he said. I opened up, and he took a shot at me, a conversation turned into an argument and I shouldn’t have been surprised, I don’t know why I was.
I guess I thought we were past all the middle-school/high-school melodrama, the stupid fucking bickering. I’d seen him at his fucking worst, I’d seen the black hole in his head when his shitty little life came crumbling down around him.
We sit on a riverbank in the middle of the night; the Delaware. It had been a weird camping trip, us and two close friends. He wouldn’t stop trying to kiss one of them, his closest friend for years beside me, who had a boyfriend and had told him she wasn’t interested at least half a hundred times. He kept trying to sneak a peak when they were changing.
He’d disappeared in the middle of the night, and I didn’t care, he was playing the whole “I’m in so much pain come rescue me” act for the girl, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to go out there to get him, and apparently I was still his friend so it fell to me.
He talks a bunch of shit, he’s a trainwreck at this point and the gasoline’s still burning off from the crash. He wants me to promise I’ll always be around, I’ll always think of him as a friend, and I do, but he doesn’t know what it means to me. It means I’ll watch as he goes down in flames, it means I’ll be there to tell him to go fuck himself for not listening when everything goes wrong. It doesn’t mean I won’t hate him for it, it doesn’t mean I’ve ever forgiven him, for anything, or ever will.
And I kept that promise, I still keep it. A long time ago he asked me to be his best man; I doubt he’d still want me for it, but just in case I’ve got my speech all written out: “You deserve this.”
It’s funny, how it’s only the people that close to you who can really hurt you. He knows where a lot of the bodies are buried, he knows where the blood pools.
So he took his shot at the campfire, twisted the knife with that shit-eating grin on his face.
I was leaving in three days, but the next day I didn’t pack, I didn’t do much of anything. I reflected, ostensibly, on the change that was coming. I brooded, in reality, in cold fury, in spite and malice. I wanted to hurt him, but of course I wouldn’t. I was better than that. Instead I ritualized our severance, I internalized the distance that he had put between us, internalized the spite that was, ultimately, the bedrock of our friendship.
The next morning - the sun’s too bright for 1 o’clock in the morning, but my phone won’t stop beeping. A message, from him.
“Did you curse me last night or something?”
Weird thing to say, I guess, although not really the first time someone’s accused me of something like it. I’ve always been a little spooky - the quiet kid. And I’d perfected a bitter stare back in high school through hours of practiced contempt and disdain for everyone around me. More than a few people seemed to be actually convinced I had the evil eye.
A large, heavy table had crushed his hand at work in the morning. Permanent damage. Lost the top of one of his fingers, very lucky it wasn’t more.
And the funny thing was, all I thought was “Huh, maybe I did.” I feigned concern, even acted offended he’d suggest I’d do such a thing.
But in a curious way, it satisfied me. It felt exactly like he’d gotten what was coming to him. The only reason we stayed friends is because of that, because it felt like we were even.
I’m still not sure if I feel guilty about that. No, let’s be serious. I’m not sure if I should feel guilty, I’m not sure if I should be ashamed that I don’t feel bad about it.
Sometimes when he really pisses me off, I’ll just smile and think to myself - next time it’ll be a whole finger.
I’ve told exactly one person about that, and that was only the abridged, edited version. If any of my secrets can be called deep and dark, it’s that one.
…
The last one feels foolish. I have a hard time taking myself too seriously; I’ve never stopped feeling like a little kid wearing grown-up clothes, waiting for someone to catch on.
But the things that really matter are fairly serious, and one of the things I genuinely don’t like about myself is that I have a hard time admitting to them. It feels like the worst kind of betrayal.
The short version: I practice the occult. The long version, made short, is that the occult is not the same thing as all that new-agey horseshit, fortunetellers looking to make a quick buck off people looking for false hope, or the ‘misunderstood’ gothy-emo kids who are totally going to get back at all the kids who picked on them by summoning satan.
I may be contradicting myself by sharing the story in which my friend thinks I might have cursed him, but the important distinction there is I honestly have no idea if it’s even possible that I was responsible, and if I was then it worked so fuck off.
The occult, strictly defined, is really a lot of things. Technically it just means “hidden” or something along those lines, and basically encompasses the (often ill-fated) exploration of all the strange and mysterious things we cannot easily explain. It is important to note that science originates here, and the only real distinction is in whether or not something can be readily measured and tested. Chemistry was alchemy back when guessing at the influence of humors and elements was the best we could do.
That doesn’t mean that the shit people come up with in the pursuit of the occult isn’t horeshit, because people will believe all kinds of stupid shit when you can’t prove them wrong.
But at the same time, there are some questions that are important, even if there are no easy means of answering them. The scientifc literature on consciousness is a black morass; google “the hard problem of consciousnesses” if you’re curious. The occult literature on consciousness, however, is… well, if nothing else it’s interesting. People offer up crude, often nonsensical models, but they share methods for meditation, tricks for fucking with your brain, ways to see and feel things in new ways.
And how do you know if it works if you don’t try? How do you know what it feels like?
I found out, and I liked it. I’ve gotten to know pieces of myself that were utterly alien before. I’ve learned that there’s a whole universe of unjustified insanity just waiting behind my eyelids, and I fucking love it.
And I’ve tried invocation, and evocation, and practical (more colorfully known as black) magick; I’ve no pretensions about being able to call down lightning or ~summon dark powers to do my bidding~ but I’ve seen enough to stay curious, I’ve seen enough to know that even though there’s a lot of utter garbage lying around, that maybe there’s really something going on underneath. Probably not what we’d expect, anymore than those silly fucks poisoning themselves with lead trying to get gold would have expected that the identity of materials was largely determined by numbers of protons, neutrons, and electrons. But hey, did you know that we can turn lead into gold now? It’s way more expensive than the amount of gold that’s produced, but hey. Magick, baby.
So maybe it makes me look foolish, messing around with shit that no one understand and getting it wrong. But I’ve got pieces of deer ribs dangling off my rear view mirror where they’ve got crosses, my evenings smell like ash and burning wood, and those really deep, heavy trances where the world is dripping fire down your throat are better than sex.
And I love it.
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