About little girls who grow up to become witches

(Wrote this a while back after watching “the K2")

Dear Jeha,

I have been thinking about death lately. In fact, the first time I met you, you reminded me of it. Of what it’s like to be powerless and afraid.



Vulnerable.



And all these instincts reminded me, for the first time in a long time, of what it means to be human. To feel your pulse under a gun, your breath under a knife. To not know.



I will not offer any explanations for my choices. Not the good ones or the bad. And how many have had the chances I did, and willingly lost them?

“That isn’t bravery”, you would tell me. Perhaps, you think me a savage, and a fool, but who has lived and not been both?



I won’t pretend to be grateful, that I got a second chance to feel this way. Because it was fated the second I laid eyes on you. Many think it was the unconventionality of it all, that kept me, kept us both. But that’s funny, because when had either of us ever given a second thought to the world and its rules?



I admit it was intoxicating, the control, the power I could wield with a single sentence and perhaps that is why I let it make a slave of me. But that potency was also the only thing I had to live for, my lifeline.



What was I to be, if not a witch? And doesn’t everyone need a mirror to find themselves? Or maybe they don’t. Maybe it was just me. Maybe it was just us.



I would still blame it all on them. The men I didn’t choose and those I did. Maybe that’s why you seemed so different. A wolf among all the hunting dogs who had stolen from me.



You told me I either needed someone I could worship, or someone who could worship me, and that you could be neither. You are wrong Because I already had those. A father I worshipped, in the way only little girls do, a husband who once worshipped me, in the way only power-hungry men do. And somewhere, in time, I resigned myself to it. To not having a heartbeat, not breathing. Not living.



Isn’t it funny? How one single person’s trust is enough to make you give up everything? To happily let the castles that you’d built piece by piece, crumble in one fell swoop.



I still think, it would have been better if you hadn’t promised you would come back that second time. Or if you really had the heart to pull the trigger when that gun was against my temple. But that is also a lie, because then, I wouldn’t be thinking of you, of death, today.



Maybe if we had met earlier, much earlier, in circumstances very different from these, we could’ve been something else. Maybe then I could’ve shattered that mirror then. Maybe I could’ve had better things to live and die for.

But it wasn’t all bad in the end, was it?



Because you managed to catch me off-guard anyway. Because I got to see your hate-filled smile and trust-filled eyes. To have the courage to destroy myself laughing.



Thank you, for helping me remember again, what it’s like to be weak, to lose all the cards and not regret it.