Aftermath pt. II
The man who cursed me worked in the shop perched at the very top of the hill.
The man who cursed me worked in the shop perched at the very top of the hill.
You had to climb three narrow streets to reach it, past the fifteenth-century fountain in the main square and the viewpoint with the wooden bench where I loved to sit and read for hours on end on sunny weekends. Inside the shop, the air was thick with sweet smoke, and wooden drawers filled with sandalwood and jasmine lined the wall.
Before he cursed me, the man sold us three sticks of my favorite incense and told me my hair could use some horsetail extract. We made small talk about the summer tourists and lingered behind the counter.
He was, in all likelihood, a charlatan.
What he must have noticed was the way I looked at the man I had walked in with, the way my body angled toward his like a thirsty sunflower — automatic, involuntary, embarrassing in its honesty. That was all anybody noticed in those final days.
The man who cursed me guessed both our astrological signs with surprising ease, then proclaimed that we would be better off not giving into whatever the tension in the room was or it would consume us.
For two whole years, he said. At least.
It will haunt you, you’ll be obsessed.
He said it lightly, the way you might mention the weather, and the three of us waited a few heavy seconds before breaking out in easy laughter.
The cursed man and I walked down the hill in silence. In the car, we put on some Springsteen and discussed the lasagna we were going to cook when we got back. The world kept spinning and the evening moved slowly, but that night I didn’t sleep.
So you feel it too, I told the shopkeeper in my mind. The red string. The shackles.
I turned the two years over and over in my mouth, allowing the curse to lodge itself in my brain like a splinter and spread all through my bloodstream.
The day I became a cursed woman I realized why the heart will take the version of the story where it gets to keep going — however thin, however unlikely, however dependent on a stranger in a smoke-filled shop who was almost certainly making the whole thing up.
The only alternative was something colder: that the time we had behind us had already been the whole story.
A woman with a death sentence who’s just been handed more time doesn’t ask whether the paperwork is legitimate. She takes what she can get and she runs.
Was I always going to go mad?
Did the future which is now my past already have my name on it, already waiting, regardless of what any man on any hill said to me that afternoon? Or did the act of saying it instill the seed of obsession between my ribs?
I can read a room, a tarot spread, the particular quality of someone’s silence. But when it comes to matters of the heart, my finely-tuned inner compass spins like it’s lost north entirely, oscillating between there is something unfinished here and no one has ever built such a spectacularly delusional cathedral of meaning around a moment that barely existed.
Both feel equally true. Neither one lets me sleep.
I believe the curse and I don’t. Both. Fully. Simultaneously. Schrödinger’s curse — alive and dead in the same box, and I cannot stop lifting the lid to check.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? Does a curse only land if part of you is willing to receive it?
There’s a thread. Is there? It consumes you, it spans and it snaps.
Snap.
This is the part I am less comfortable admitting: If I truly believed in fate — if I really trusted that the thread ran strong and that the Universe was handling it — I would not need to obsess. I would not need to replay, to analyze, to keep any particular door cracked open with one foot in the frame.
Obsession is not evidence of fate, but proof that I don’t quite believe in it.
I obsess because some part of me believes that if I stop, the thread unravels. That my remembering is what keeps it real. That I am holding the whole thing together with the sheer force of my not-letting-go.
I am a woman who has always wanted more than what she was given, so I hold on. I supervise, I tend. I keep the fire going through the night, convinced that if I stop, the whole thing goes dark.
But the man on the hill, charlatan or prophet, could not have known any of this.
He just saw a woman angling her body toward someone who had not angled back — not in the same way, not with the same hunger — and he did the kindest thing a stranger can do for a starved woman.
He gave her a story strong enough to feed on.