TWISTED

CW: Anorexia, implied sexual violence, mental health

From the moment I saw her on the window of the maternity ward where my daughter was standing, showing her to us, I knew my granddaughter Selena was special. I know, you will say, “How could you see that from far away?” but my gut was rarely wrong.

It was a varicella epidemic in the region at the time, so we were not allowed near the baby. That’s why the hospital window was the place where we saw her cute tiny face first. That face with fluffy hair, piercing eyes and soft mouth, her tiny body wrapped in all kinds of white things, seemed too good for this world. She didn’t cry or anything, she seemed to be observing us carefully but yes, I may have always sensed things… yet, that kid was special.

I come from a long line of healers, and I knew, deep inside, she would need all the protection in the world. Even from the distance, it was obvious she was pure-hearted and kind, and the world loves to chew and spit on the people like her. I felt stirring in my womb – it was as if I had given birth to her, not my daughter.

She was also a fighter. She was born at the end of the seventh month and weighed only 2 kilos and 250 grams. Forty-six centimetres long which was fine. Later we would find out my daughter was lying about the date of her conception and that Selena was a full-term baby. Her weight was due to my daughter’s neurosis not to gain weight, and she basically starved herself. No wonder Selena developed anorexia in her early adolescence. Thank God her unhealthy relationship with food was resolved and gave way to her thirst for knowledge but that’s a story for another time.

The moment she was brought home, I saw my daughter was strangely clueless for a medical worker. There was no way she could ever protect someone so fragile and strong at the same time. Maybe it was post-partum depression.

Prior to her leaving the hospital, I had made a decision and told my husband we were taking Sel. It was a good thing we were living with my daughter and her husband. Selena’s father was a good man but devastated by the things my daughter had put him through so he gave in since he was at work all day.

I gave Selena her first bath putting rosemary and basil for protection and to attract positive energy. All the baths she had ever got were given by me. Even as a baby, she had a heightened sense of what was going on around her and the atmosphere in her parents’ part of the house was not always positive. Selena seemed to absorb the energy around her, as her mother would later say, “she was born with invisible antennae” and then she couldn’t sleep. So I added more things to her bath and smeared a handful of a special oil that I was making myself. I used lavender to give her peace, relaxation, and spiritual clarity, and thyme to help her fight off negative energy.

As she was growing older, she proved to have been able to sense someone’s bad intentions and negativity. When she was starting to walk, a neighbour came into our front yard and my beloved granddaughter collapsed! She just went white as a sheet and stopped breathing. The horror was indescribable! By the time we had reached the ER, she was weak but conscious, her breathing normalized. It turned out the neighbour came with a bit of heavy gossip and Sel felt its weight and collapsed under it. However, that was just the beginning.

The moment someone “bad” stepped through our doors, Selena’s eyes would become red, she would get a terrible headache and start crying. It was heart-wrenching. That was a regular occurrence when she was 3 years old. Her parents were quite worried but there was a family joke that our Selena was a “human detector of evil and human grime”.

However, it was time to take real action. I talked to her parents but they were against any kind of “magic” as they called it. My son-in-law was familiar with some bad things from his part of the world. He claimed his mother got cancer after she had stepped on a shiny snake-like thing made of pearls. They simply vanished into her body. The following year she died of cancer. He was truly scared of any kind of such things. My daughter was firmly against it.

I still decided to act on my own. I felt physical pain every time Selena was suffering when sensing someone’s negative energy, let alone something worse.

When I visited our village high up in the mountains, my mother said: “You know what you should start doing.” She brought the Witches’ Salt but the kind that could have been found only on our mountain, near the village, the ashes from our wood burner and the immortelle incense.

She gave me the instructions what to do and how to cleanse the pestle and mortar and which incantation to say while using them.

I came home to town, hiding everything in a secret cabinet. When Sel’s parents left for work the following morning, I set out to work. Selena was in the front yard with my husband, petting the cherry tree bark.

I made sure they were very busy and got down to work. I took a bit of all ingredients and added thyme, all the while chanting:

"Your demise, you herby pure, brings me a powerful cure.

Here's to you, herby, to perish, and to me to heal and make Selena flourish".

I repeated the incantation twelve times. The mortar was surrounded by five candles my mother had made of beeswax from their own hives. The candles were first buried in the salt for 20 minutes and then anointed with sage oil, famous for its healing properties, protection and supporting mental and emotional well-being. Each candle was charged with magical intent stating each candle’s purpose.

Number 1: Protect Selena from bad intentions and negativity.

Number 2: Protect her from physical pain.

Number 3: Help her fight off emotional turmoil.

Number 4: Help her get clarity when thrown off her stability.

Number 5: Help her stay calm and sleep peacefully when faced with negative energy.

The candles were a visible representation of the Fire Element – Selena was born on Tuesday, the Mars Day, and she was an Aries, again fire. No wonder she had always enjoyed cold waters to extinguish her excess fire within. At the end of the ritual, I snuffed the candles not to “insult” the Fire Element.

I put the mixture in several leather pouches under her pillow, in her wardrobe and her shampoo. First it was 3 times a week until she was six. The moment “someone negative” was about to cross our threshold, she would withdraw into the back yard. She started developing her already existing abilities. As the time went by, I put the mixture in her drawers with books, her school bag, sometimes in her food or the elderberry juice so that strange taste was barely sensed.

Every summer we went to our mountain where my mother and I would take her to gather herbs, teaching her how to make healing ointments and potions. She made great use of aromatic incense and would often melt and mix candle stubs, adding eucalyptus, thyme or peppermint.

I saw her inner strength grow with each passing year and added ritual. Sometimes, when we were alone, especially when she was in high school, we would make the first mixture together changing the incantation slightly. Hers would refer to me.

There were times when she would put her inner shield down and someone's malice would hit her right in the chest and make her heart constrict. She would put the shield back up once she regained her breath. There are so many people with bad intentions.

Yet, she managed not to listen to her gut instinct when it was screaming she should turn away and run in the opposite direction. A son of the priest. An evil snake. Those were three terrible years. I performed all kinds of protection rituals and negative energy cleansers. Oh, to no avail! I prayed in church every day. Nothing. She was becoming weak and ill with every passing month. Sometimes, they would break up and she would get back to her normal self, drawn and thin as a skeleton but free. Then, following the last break up, he had done something terrible, violent. Never had he done it before but when her resistance to his snake charm stayed firm, he crossed all the thresholds and boundaries of human decency.

My Selena took some time to heal physically. Mentally and emotionally, she was stronger than ever thanks to all those rituals we had performed over the years, together or by me. She just needed the time to heal physically. All the while she was plotting how to get rid of him for good. The true ritual for self-protection should have come from her genuine intent.

She called me one day and asked me to buy her a broom and bring some holy water from the monastery on the mountain. She also wanted me to bring a lot of vervain leaves.

When I came, she was her usual self. The ordeal through which she had gone was visible only in the way she moved – she was still stiff in the hips.

“Gran, here is the pestle and the mortar. Start your protection spell. Please!”, she said quietly.

She took the broom, turned it upside down and placed it behind the door.

“By this broom, my hateful shrew once loved and cherished, I banish you from my presence and from my life perish!” She said a short prayer as well and moved on.

In the meantime, I sprinkled holy water all over the broom and then we took the mortar and lit the fire in it. She picked up the vervain and called out his name. Selena flung the leaves on the fire and said: "Withdraw from me now, I need you not. Go away from me and marry off!". She repeated that 12 times expressing a fervent wish to get rid of this person and fling him into the arms of the one who was pursuing him the most.

“I am doing her a favour, whoever she may be, since she wants him so much she can have him. I just need to reclaim my peace, strengthen my boundaries, and banish negative influences on my own energy”, she added apologetically.

“You don’t have to justify yourself in front of me, my Moon Goddess, it was high time you banished him from your life!”

She hesitated: “Whoever she is, I am scared for her. She’s going to think she has won but she will suffer profusely, more than me.”

We had been repeating the ritual with the broom and the vervain until we heard he was getting married.

“Out of the blue!”, his mother piped out.

Turned out the poor girl had been seeing him in secret for months and got pregnant. His father made him marry her which was, honestly, the right thing to do.

Selena met her in the street. The girl was full of energy and youthful ignorance – she thought she had won.

“What use is beauty and brains if you can’t keep a man and make him happy?”, she yelled so that the entire street can hear, pretending to be saying that to her friends.

Selena simply turned a blind eye and a deaf ear.

A year later she met them on the street. The once-youthful girl looked like a shadow of her former self. She was overweight with thinning hair but her grey complexion and lack of any kind of once-exuberant energy were clear signs of an unhappy union.

“How does this make you feel?”, asked her Gran.

“Not good but it's not my fault. It was bound to happen”, Selena said feeling sorry for her. “But I needed to protect myself and all kinds of protective rituals are always welcome”, she added.

Her grandma looked at the girl, now a woman, looking miserable and said:

“I could perform a healing ritual for her, she looks like she needs one badly.”

“No”, Selena said firmly. “She made her bed, she might as well lie in it. For good.”

Then she added, smiling slyly: "However, he, on the other hand...is not important anymore! My nightmare is over, too bad somebody else's has just begun!"

We walked on, I holding onto a stick and her arm.