the hierophant
Remember how I said that we find who we are meant? Did you feel that when you first saw me watching you?
Do you know how you effect me?
Sam taught me about magic. I lived with him for many years before he started telling me things. He silently observed me reading books about the occult and divination. Back then I believed there was something mystical to it.
I now apprehend the great difference between the principals of magic and esotericism. These days magic, to us, is something facile. The craft is not what Sam taught me which proved of value.
He taught me the limitless potential of ritual.
You see, with no fear of death, I have been prepared to conclude this life on numerous occasions. The first was from a cathedral ceiling beam in the 
room I rented from Sam. He silently entered and stared at me blankly. I had been living with him for over fifty months at that point, during which period we exchanged approximately three dozen sentences.
“That won’t get you anywhere,” he advised the day he discovered me with a black cord looped over my head and one foot stepped forward off a three-legged stool. “You will only have to start again.”
Like Connie, Sam was generations older than me, in his seventies. He began to put together different satchels of herbs for me to carry in my pocket and gave me crocheted pouches of crystals to wear around my neck. I started paying more attention to the moon.
The afternoon I left Sam he put both hands on each of my cheeks. “Listen closely,” he said. “Always listen.”
I started living alone after that. I awoke one day feeling unsettled and walked from my studio on Bleeker Street down to Sam’s place. He wasn’t there. On the way home I bought an African Violet plant. It didn’t take me long to start feeling better.
Somehow lighter.