Witch

By: VSH

A teenage girl doesn’t feel –

|Flesh and thoughts are the only sustaining meal|

– If she did, there would be much more screaming.

Terror is the only present dreaming\

Or maybe she’s gotten so good –

/For the reality of all a man could.

– At sitting still and looking pretty.

God made lamb for his holy city\

She wants to love and be loved –

/To tear out its heart ungloved.

– But cruelty is her only defense.

Divinity made her a capital offense\

She is so, so tired –

/Letting men tie her up to be fired.

– But when she tries to rest –

Watching as her only friends arrest\

– Her pretty little head –

/– Finds the executioner’s bed.

|They all scream Witch|

|She was just a girl|

---

I’m sitting in a cafe with more homework than I can reasonably get done, and I still haven’t started it. I’m staring, waiting for the assignments to finish themselves, and the clock continues to tick as my late work gets later. I feel like I’ve fallen into someone I haven’t been since high school. Logistically, I know it’s just a slump—I know that—but I feel disconnected from who I am.

I’m so obsessively all or nothing in every facet of my life to the point that sometimes it feels like I’m the one killing me, but not even in a suicidal way or whatever. “Calypso, I release you from your human bonds,” from Pirates of the Carribean, but what I want someone to say to me about this fleshy prison. I quit my job at the district attorney’s office recently... No one knows that yet. As far as my boss and everyone I talk to is concerned, it’s a “hiatus” until classes end this semester. God, I really don’t want to go back, though.

Hence, the slump. Here was my plan: I would get into Columbia or Brown and come back home to work as a DA until I ran for state rep. I was going to be important. Help someone. Change the world—the whole childish mindset. Jeez, that sounds so pretentious. Especially now that I don’t even want to do it anymore. I lost my zest. I’m a zestless, rizzless college student desperately searching for where their spark went. Tale as old as time.

Anyway, I lit a candle and remembered joking about how I’m like every girl ever (I really like candles.) Then I thought of the idea of writing something about how “we burned the women before us and now lighting a candle is feminine. We honor the ash before us by making something else burn,” but clearly, I didn’t make that work... so I’ll have to figure that out another time.