love spell
A red candle — warm flame licking the walls, casting a soft, hazy, golden glow — “let your love fill the room” — direct your love at the person you want the most — say a few words and poof. That’s how you conjure it. Famous, infamous, turbulent, graceful, earthy, effervescent Love. It’s almost too simple.
*
The next time you see him, during the class you have together, you feel like your teeth are vibrating inside of your skull. Is that where love is stored, in the teeth? The heart is home to courage/fear, and the stomach to butterflies, so it’s not them. Something else other than love is storied in the vulva. And love cannot survive in the head. So, then, teeth it is. They chatter as you tremble.
He glances your way, smiles, and you wonder if he can read your mind and know that he has been implicated in this. You blush warm and red, like the candle, and you wonder if bewitching him with a love spell would be wrong.
*
But he will fall in love with you.
*
Will he arrive at your doorstep on some wet, windswept evening, hair matted by the rain and cheeks flushed by the chill? Will he roll into your life like a storm? Or will he sidle up to you gradually? Soft touches, gentle grins, a slow courtship. Will he kiss you hard and solid, or feathery and light?
Either way, he will fall in love with you. You will take him on dates to movies he’s never heard of but you have and they’re supposed to be good. You will move first to San Francisco and then to Amsterdam because you’ve always wanted to live overseas and you will be rich enough to do so (if you can bewitch yourself a man, girl, you should be able to conjure up some funds, too). You will have a son named Clark and a daughter named Iris. You will raise your children in the Jewish tradition because you are their mother, and Judaism is passed through the maternal line, and together the four of you will bake challah on the Sabbath.
You’ll still take him on dates even when you’re old.
*
Wishing, praying and spellcasting are rooted in the same emotion. Each involves different actions, different steps, different faiths, and are called by different names. But each is, ultimately, internal, and defined by the same feeling of desperate, I’ll-do-whatever-I-think-it-will-take want.
Maybe he really will fall in love with you. (Maybe the spell will work, after all, but praying certainly didn’t, and where did wishing ever goddamn land anybody?)
But what happens if the spell pitters out and you’re left with nothing but a lover who is confused about why he is even with you in the first place? It’s not like you can say to him, “You’re here because I bewitched you. You’re here because I made you be.”
That’s the worst possible answer to an impossible question.
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*
You just have to wish and pray that your spell holds, or that it wears off before you uproot your lives and move to San Francisco together.
*
What is it you really fear? Not that the spell will wear off and he will realize he doesn’t love you.
You really fear that if the spell wears off, you alone won’t be enough to make him stay.
You fear a love built on deceit, a love built on a lie. A love built on the idea that you are something you’re not and that one day, he’ll see it, too, and he will leave you, as well as Clark and Iris, in Amsterdam with nothing but a loaf of challah, some movie ticket stubs and a half-burnt red candle.
You ask yourself, would he still love you if he really knew you? Would he love you if you hadn’t made him? And you fear that the answer is no. You realize that you might not want him if the answer is no.
*
You try other things instead. You try breathing exercises that are supposed to subdue your blushes. You stalk him on social media, looking for any traces of a girlfriend or a boyfriend. You watch clips of the sport he plays on YouTube so that when he talks about it during class you can jump into the conversation with an informed, intelligent point. You will never really understand the plot of sports, but lord, you are trying.
You wonder why he doesn’t simply like you. Aren’t boys this age supposed to want to fuck anything that moves? (You figure that love comes after fucking, in this scenario.) You worry that you’re you too ugly, too fat and hairy. You start going to the gym and getting your mustache waxed regularly.
You tone your flabby body. You fall in love with the high that comes after cardio. You develop a butt and some actual abdominal muscles for the first time maybe ever, but certainly since grade school. You keep training.
But eventually you begin to worry. Would he love you if you hadn’t lost weight? You fear that the answer is no. You realize that you might not really want him if the answer is no. But more poignant is the fear that if you quit now, he will never think you’re beautiful. And this is before he even loves you. This is when you’re still trying to make yourself worthy of his love.
You realize that this is just another way to wish. Another form of prayer. Another spell you’re trying to cast.
*
You go back to the drawing board. You circle back to spellcasting, and recall how before taking a high school exam you used to pour wine into a birdbath in your backyard and imagine you were presenting a sacrifice to Athena for wisdom. All this is just an appeal to the benevolent forces in the universe. Please help me.
You buy yourself a red candle and sit on the floor of your bedroom and wonder. Is bewitching him with a love spell wrong? Will he wake up one morning and realize he doesn’t know what he is doing sleeping beside you? Is all of that any different from going to the gym to lose weight, or watching sports videos you hate on YouTube, or wishing, or praying? Please help me!
It occurs to you that he might laugh if he knew you were sitting on your bedroom floor burning candles and casting love spells and agonizing over whether or not it was ethical to do so when you could just ask him for his phone number.
You blow out the candle.
