By Ly Faulk
You will meet a man on social media and exchange pleasantries for months. The pleasantries will develop into a friendship from across the country. You will support each other from afar, provide encouragement and feedback on your various respective art projects and even propose collaboration. He will be funny without punching down, handsome without looking like a Disney prince, gentle, artistic, even whimsical. He will message you the most poetic of thoughts early in the morning before his kids wake up. This close parasocial relationship will become an obsession for you, a brilliant dot of affection in an otherwise dreary life.
You will become enamored with tarot, convince yourself that if the cards say that he loves you back, it will come true. Tarot will lead to spells. At first you will commission witches on Etsy to weave love spells for you, cheap little one-off spells that trigger frenzied conversations with the object of your affection, but no declarations of love. Then, you will decide to go big. You will lay down your hard-earned money from your dead end job on a big ticket item from a local witch, a guaranteed love spell that takes days to complete and will surely lead to the romantic relationship you desperately desire.
It will work. Your beloved will declare his love for you and decide to leave his wife, his kids, his side of the country. He will say that it is worth it if he gets to be with you. You will believe him because that is what you will have paid for, isn’t it? The happy ever after?
There will be cracks, however. He will cleave to you a little too strongly, tremble with fear when you leave for work in the morning and prostrate himself before you when you return in the evening. He will be far too accommodating, cook three meals a day for you and insist that you put your feet up while he cleans the house. It will sound like a dream come true but inside will be this nagging feeling that you’ve destroyed something sacred.
You will grow bored of his constant stream of undying love for you. You will crave a fight, a betrayal, a deviation from the fairy tale life you will have purchased for yourself. Eventually, you will beg the witch to undo the spell, to set you free of this burden of a perfect life with your perfect partner in your perfectly clean house. She will not grant it and so, you will be forced to break the news to him. He will cry and gnash his teeth and beg you to change your mind. You will not.
He will become obsessed with you, follow you to places where he shouldn’t be. He will appear at your Pilates class with flowers in hand. He will pop up at the grocery store, tears will stream down his perfect face and he will ask you why, why, a thousand times why. You will suspect that he is using tarot and paying witches to cast love spells on you but the local witch will bind you from love as punishment for what you will do to him. You will become incapable of love, only disdain for this wretch of a man, this creature of your own making. You will know that you will never love again. He will give up eventually, go back to his side of the country. On social media, you will see that he will reconcile with his wife. The pictures of him will appear hollow eyed, lean and desperate, scraped clean of joy.
Ly Faulk (they/she) is a queer writer, artist, and an all-around weirdo. They are the author of Hippie Speedball and Sick Sad Queer. Learn more about their writing at lyfaulk.com.
