Apparently, I’m a Witch

I didn’t decide to become a witch.

A woman named Sylvia told me I’d apparently already been one for thousands of years.

She didn’t actually use the word witch.

She called me a visionary. A truth seeker. Someone who, across multiple lifetimes, had supposedly developed abilities we would now call remote viewing and consciousness projection. Apparently I had traveled into spiritual realms, retrieved information, and returned to tell people what I had seen.

She also said I had repeatedly gotten myself into trouble because I insisted on telling people the truth even when they didn’t particularly want it.

Her phrase was “abrasive honesty.”

Well, fuck.

Now she had my attention.

I had booked what was essentially an Akashic Records reading. At the time, I wasn’t practicing witchcraft. I didn’t own a cauldron. I didn’t know what myrrh smelled like. I couldn’t have told you what the Greek Magical Papyri were.

I was a businessman in Brooklyn trying to understand what was happening inside a seven year relationship that was coming apart.

Sylvia said my problem wasn’t seeing.

It was translating.

Apparently I had been doing some version of this for lifetimes.

Fine.

Then she got to the woman I loved.

That’s where I thought this story got weird.

I had absolutely no idea what weird was yet.

The Throat

Sylvia stopped around her throat.

Communication.

Expression.

Will.

She described a story in which we had known each other before. Childhood friends. Both visionary. Both able to hear things other people couldn’t. Apparently we would tune ourselves with a small harp and ask questions about things beyond ordinary perception.

Totally normal childhood.

Then I apparently got myself persecuted for speaking out.

Also on brand.

According to Sylvia, the woman I loved had been prevented from expressing what she knew and felt. Some kind of block had been placed around her ability to communicate.

That got my attention.

Because communication was exactly where our relationship had become impossible.

I asked Sylvia whether we could help remove it.

She began working on it.

Then I interrupted her.

“Really just for her highest and best good, not as it relates to me.”

Remember that sentence.

It ends up explaining almost everything that follows.

When the Normal Answer Was No

Soon afterward, I asked the woman I loved to go to therapy with me.

I wasn’t asking her to promise we’d stay together.

I wasn’t asking her to pretend we didn’t have problems.

I was asking her to try.

Seven years seemed worthy of that.

She said no.

That no was enormously difficult for me to understand.

I could understand being unhappy.

I could understand wanting space.

I could understand questioning whether a relationship still worked.

What I couldn’t understand was refusing to investigate whether seven years of love could be repaired.

Underneath that was an even harder question.

How could someone simply dismiss everything I had done? Everything I had given. Everything we had built.

How could you put seven years in a drawer, close it, and continue with your life?

That question consumed me.

The conventional solution had been rejected.

So I went looking for unconventional answers.

I hired a psychic.

Then another.

Then another.

Then several more.

There was Bella.

Ella.

Gina.

Black Rose.

And others who gradually fell out of the rotation because, without quite realizing what I was doing, I developed a psychic power ranking.

Bella became the benchmark.

New readers were effectively measured against Bella.

I run companies for a living.

Apparently I had created quality assurance for clairvoyance.

The Readings

If every psychic had simply told me, “She loves you desperately and will be back Thursday,” this would have ended quickly.

I could have dismissed the entire exercise as a very expensive emotional support service.

They didn’t.

Some thought she was moving on.

Some saw contact.

Some saw a much longer separation.

Some believed there would eventually be reconciliation.

One thought she wanted me to reach out.

Others were adamant that she needed to initiate.

The timing was all over the place.

But underneath those differences, certain themes kept appearing.

She was confused.

She had feelings she wasn’t confronting.

She had put the relationship somewhere she didn’t have to look at it.

She was allowing other people to influence her.

And strangely, the outside influence kept narrowing toward the same two people.

I knew exactly who they were.

Now Sylvia’s original reading came roaring back.

Communication.

Expression.

Will.

Interference.

I had begun this whole exercise asking:

How could she do this?

Now I found myself asking:

Did she actually know what she wanted?

Those are very different questions.

The first made me angry.

The second made me want to help.

This is where a normal person might have concluded that she needed to figure that out herself.

I started researching spells.

If I’m Going Insane, I’m Going to Cite Sources

I wasn’t interested in some website telling me to write her name on a pink candle and sprinkle cinnamon around it.

I wanted primary sources.

If I was going to lose my mind, I was going to do it academically.

That led me to the Greek Magical Papyri and other surviving magical texts.

Actual ancient magic.

And holy shit, ancient magicians were committed.

One of the first spells I found required the eyes of a bat.

For an embarrassingly brief period, I actually considered the logistical problem.

Where does one find a bat in Brooklyn?

Then I pictured my three sons getting a call from the police. “We have your father here. Apparently he was wandering around Brooklyn looking for a bat.”

“Is he okay?”

“He says he needs its eyes for a spell.”

Okay.

Maybe I needed to get a wee bit back to reality.

Because anyone who knows me would hear this story and, unfortunately, not be completely shocked.

So I established rules.

No animals.

No graves.

No dead people.

Nothing requiring my children to explain my recent interest in ancient Greco-Egyptian magic to law enforcement.

I wasn’t abandoning witchcraft.

I was introducing governance.

The bat eyes were out.

The myrrh could stay.

The seashell was fine.

Iron balls apparently remained under consideration.

This felt like progress.

The Spell Problem

Ancient magic offers a surprisingly broad product line.

There were wakefulness spells.

Restlessness spells.

Attraction spells.

Protection workings.

Cleansing rituals.

Invocations involving attention, dreams, desire, and influence.

Initially, attraction was interesting for obvious reasons.

Then it stopped making sense.

If the readings were right, the problem wasn’t that she needed to feel something for me.

The problem was that she couldn’t hear herself clearly enough to understand what she felt.

That changed the assignment.

I didn’t want to manufacture obsession.

I didn’t want to force her toward me.

I wanted her strong enough to make her own decision, even if that decision wasn’t me.

So I became interested in protection.

Empowerment.

Clarity.

Removing outside influence.

All of which sounds remarkably noble until you see the fucking shopping list.

The Seashell

One ancient wakefulness working required magical words or characters written onto a seashell.

Obviously I needed a seashell.

But not just any seashell.

If you’re reconstructing ancient magic, apparently you develop standards.

I found a natural shell.

Then I needed something to write with.

A Sharpie felt disrespectful.

I ordered a reed dip pen.

Then myrrh ink.

There was also a magical formula I needed to pronounce correctly.

So now, in addition to running companies and dealing with the end of a seven year relationship, I was sitting in my Brooklyn apartment practicing ancient magical syllables so I could write them onto a seashell.

Nobody forced me to do this.

That’s worth mentioning.

At every single stage of this process I had the opportunity to stop.

I did not.

The Iron Balls

The bat spell created another research problem.

The bat was obviously out.

But could the animal component be replaced symbolically?

This somehow led to iron.

Not iron-colored beads.

Iron.

I ordered spheres advertised as 99.9 percent pure.

Then I became concerned that substituting iron might compromise the symbolic integrity of the original spell.

This was an actual concern I had.

I rejected an ancient magical working because my proposed substitution lacked sufficient historical fidelity.

Thank God I was approaching this rationally.

The iron balls arrived anyway.

I still have them.

Myrrh

Myrrh became the gateway drug.

The ancient texts love the stuff.

So I bought resin.

Then charcoal.

Then a burner.

Then I discovered that performing ancient magic inside a Brooklyn apartment introduces an adversary the ancient Egyptians never had to contend with.

Smoke detectors.

Ritual design now included ventilation.

Open window?

Bathroom?

Bathtub?

How much smoke?

Could the ritual be completed before the building evacuated?

The ancient magician asked whether the gods would hear him.

I was asking whether the superintendent would.

Progress.

Then came the oil lamp.

Oil goes in.

Wick goes in.

Fire comes out.

I looked at it and immediately thought: This thing has “burn down the house” written all over it.

Apparently even witches need renters insurance.

The Cleansing

I performed a cleansing ritual in my apartment.

Myrrh burning.

Doors open.

Intentional language.

Moving through the space.

The first measurable result was that flies and mosquitoes apparently wanted absolutely nothing to do with ancient magic.

Then, almost overnight, my personal life picked up substantially.

Coincidence?

Spell?

I had no idea.

But by this point I was taking notes.

Because naturally I had turned witchcraft into analytics.

We Need a Control Group

This is where things became objectively ridiculous.

I started comparing psychic readings before and after rituals. Did the language change? Did the outside influence appear weaker? Did her emotional state shift? Did the predicted timing move?

I wasn’t simply consulting psychics anymore.

I was changing variables.

Then Black Rose started performing protection work of her own.

Well, shit.

Now I had contamination.

If something changed afterward, which intervention caused it?

Mine?

Hers?

Both?

Neither?

I had somehow recreated the methodological problems of a clinical trial around witchcraft.

We needed a control group.

There was no control group.

There was just me, several psychics, a former partner who had no idea this imaginary research department existed, and an increasingly concerning amount of myrrh.

At this point, I should remind you that I have three children, run companies, raise money from investors, and am generally trusted to make consequential decisions involving actual dollars.

Yet I was now conducting an uncontrolled supernatural experiment from my apartment.

Love does not necessarily make you stupid.

It does, however, dramatically expand the range of things you are willing to classify as reasonable.

The Moon

Then the moon started fucking up my schedule.

Some workings wanted waxing.

Others wanted waning.

I found one that fit exactly what I wanted to accomplish.

I’d missed the appropriate moon.

I was genuinely annoyed.

I run businesses with deadlines, investor calls, and product launches. Now lunar positioning was creating scheduling conflicts.

“Find another spell.”

This became a perfectly reasonable instruction in my life.

Apparently I had acquired a celestial operations department.

And this was the point where the absurdity of the entire operation should have been impossible to miss.

I had started with:

Will you go to therapy with me?

And somehow arrived at:

Unfortunately, we missed the waning moon.

Love is fucking insane.

The Work Changed

But underneath all the absurdity, something important had happened.

I had started this process trying to understand how someone could dismiss seven years and everything I had done.

The readings gradually pushed me toward a different explanation.

Maybe she couldn’t hear herself clearly enough to know what she actually wanted.

Maybe other people’s voices had become louder than her own.

Maybe putting difficult feelings in a drawer wasn’t resolution. Maybe it was simply the only way she knew how to deal with them.

And once I started thinking that way, I did what I had done for seven years.

I tried to help.

That was what the protection work was about.

That was what the empowerment work was about.

Strengthen her.

Clear the interference.

Help her hear herself.

Then let her choose.

It brought me directly back to the sentence I had said to Sylvia before any of this began.

For her highest and best good.

Not as it relates to me.

There was just one thing I hadn’t noticed.

The relationship was over.

And I was still working for her.

I Was Tired

Nearly two months after the breakup, I was still trying to help the woman who had declined my offer to work on the relationship.

Think about the absurdity of that.

She wouldn’t go to therapy with me.

So I had apparently responded by assembling a paid supernatural support team.

Psychics.

Tarot readers.

Ancient magicians who had been dead for roughly two thousand years.

Black Rose.

Me.

The moon.

Everyone was working on this relationship except the other person who had actually been in it.

And suddenly I was tired.

Not heartbroken.

Not lonely.

Tired.

I recognized the feeling immediately.

I had felt it during the relationship.

I was still doing the work.

She just wasn’t there anymore.

And no amount of myrrh could make that less obvious.

Mine

So I stopped.

Not loving her.

Not caring what happened to her.

Helping her.

That distinction mattered.

For seven years, helping had become reflexive.

Apparently even the end of the relationship hadn’t been enough to switch it off.

Until it was.

I did one final piece of work.

This one wasn’t for her.

It was for me.

I withdrew my energy using a spell of course.

Mine.

Back.

She could understand herself.

Or not.

She could listen to the two people around her.

Or not.

She could someday reconsider what happened.

Or not.

She could decide that leaving was the greatest decision of her life.

Fine.

None of it required my assistance.

Her life.

Her choice.

Her work.

What was hers is hers again.

What was mine is mine again.

Maybe That Was the Magic

I had tried psychics.

Tarot.

Ancient Greek magic.

Protection spells.

Empowerment spells.

Myrrh.

Moon phases.

Iron balls.

A fucking seashell.

All because the woman I loved wouldn’t go to therapy.

That sentence may be the most accurate description of what love can do to an otherwise functional human being that I have ever written.

And nearly two months after the breakup, I finally did the one thing I had never been able to do during seven years together.

I stopped trying to help her.

That may also be one of the hidden costs of an age gap relationship. Experience makes helping easy. You’ve solved more problems because you’ve had more problems. You’ve survived more things because you’ve had more time to survive them.

So you solve.

You provide.

You anticipate.

You protect.

Eventually, if you’re not careful, helping becomes carrying.

I had become so accustomed to carrying that I continued doing it after there was no relationship left to carry.

Until I didn’t.

I still have the myrrh.

The charcoal.

The reed pen.

The seashells.

The iron balls.

And that ridiculous little oil lamp that I remain convinced is eventually going to kill me.

I started all of this because I couldn’t understand her.

Then I became convinced that perhaps she couldn’t understand herself.

So I tried to help her do that too.

Of course I did.

Then one day, for the first time, I didn’t want to anymore.

No anger.

No revenge.

No final lesson I needed her to learn.

I just didn’t want the job.

I left her life to her.

I took mine back.

Maybe none of the spells worked.

Maybe all of them did.

I have absolutely no idea.

But love had somehow taken me from couples therapy to psychics to myrrh to a fucking seashell to scheduling conflicts with the moon.

And after all of that, the thing I finally changed was me.

Maybe that was the real magic.

• • •

Paul Harkins