Breadcrumb #552
SARA KNUDSON
My mother kept crystals charged by moonlight on the roof. Clear quartz, amethysts, moonstones. Negative and positive energy. She collected them, rotated them in wicker baskets woven underwater, wishes held in her breath as she threaded softened fibers together. This is how you impregnate things with powers and wishes. And I’ve heard all the new-agey bullshit about the transformative effects of having a hobby— this was different.
She talked about energy like we were all batteries, fully charged or rusting, leaking battery acid. It had nothing to do with our days, with the thoughts on our minds, with the events in our lives. We were positive or negatively charged, leaking goodness or evil into the world, and we could fix the bad vibrations by hanging rocks around our necks and smearing oils of distant flowers and herbs on our skin. More often I broke out in a rash and numbed my brain with Benadryl.
By the end of high school I was a boiling pot with the lid on. I steamed with negative energy, and no amount of pretty rocks or crystals could have buried the frustration in me. I wanted to scream at my mother’s avoidance, her nonsensical alignment of answers plucked from stars and planets, charted by her birth hour. I wanted to eat the moon and the stars and the planets instead of her organic vegan biscuits slathered with chunks of waxy honeycomb. I found stingers in it twice.
“By the end of high school I was a boiling pot with the lid on.”
It seemed to worsen with age. Soon the earth was flat, a disc floating on the backs of turtles or perhaps elephants. I’m not sure. She saw evidence for it everywhere: in the horizon, in maps, in spilled tea leaves. I asked her how her horoscope could work without the spherical flight of heavenly bodies, but she replied that these, in fact, were real, and cyclical, but not the Earth, not us, at the center of all.
We had so little choice but to turn and spin around her, so certain was she, so adept at spinning perception. Reality rotated around her, and we were merely satellites, aligned or misaligned. This is how you infect the world with powers and wishes. You spin them until you unravel.
Her last obsession was breatharianism.