A Story That Hasn’t Existed Until Now

What happens when a Jewish forest witch visits an ancient chapel in Spain.

The chapel is quiet in a way that makes me want to breathe the moment into my chest and hold it there. The walls have listened to hundreds of years' worth of prayers, but I get the feeling we humans still ask for the same things. Light spills through a stained glass window—one that someone painted with painful precision.

I was raised by a Jewish father and a psychic mother. My childhood was the intersection of Hanukkah and tarot cards, so I wasn’t familiar with a house of worship beyond nature. But as I lie there, I hear all the untold stories—all the pain that’s been set down within these walls—and I understand. It is a meeting place. A suspension of suffering.

I teach a class at golden hour, when sunlight paints quiet patterns on the worn in walls. Everyone quietly leaves after the meditation, save for three of us. I glance over at my best friend who has a towel over her face, which usually means she’s either dreaming of her past lives or feeling too much within this one.

I turn on a playlist of all my favorite film scores. I don’t know when I’ll again have the chance to play music in a building older than Da Vinci’s brush strokes. When I’ll again feel a song hold the entire moment together in an echo chamber of everything we’ve experienced.

I look up and see sunlight spill through the stained glass, and it feels like the past is bursting through the seams of the present. Like I can feel my entire life crashing into a single second—the way a wave slams into a mountain wall.

I peer into the rich, deep color of the glass, and I understand: our pain, our suffering, the things we survive and come back from—that is what gives the glass its color. That is what allows something beyond pure sunlight to shine through. It creates this wonderful texture, this pattern that tells a story that’s never existed before. No story like yours has existed before—not in the way you’ve lived it.

If I weren’t a writer, I think I would’ve been an archaeologist—digging for stories in the dirt instead of excavating the ones inside me. I wonder if I’ll ever stop turning moments into poetry. If a chapel will ever just be a chapel, and not a whisper of all the tales I’ll never hear. I take one last look at the worn-in walls and wonder how many people are left who will choose to be beautiful ruins instead of wax museums. How many will see the stains on their souls as art that adds to the world’s color.

Xx,

Your friendly neighborhood scribe.