Magical Assistance Please
A dear friend just moved a mile closer, moved into a railroad apartment where sun flows through huge windows on either end, and for the first time in her thirty-four years, this home is all her own.
Over the last four years, she had one roommate steal five thousand dollars worth of her clothes, and she had another take her rent and utility payments and put them somewhere...not toward the bills, which she only learned when the internet was turned off and the landlord told her how much was overdue.
This went on for months - the internet coming and going, her diligent payments disappearing into the mysterious void of her roommate’s care - until last month, she found herself looking at open rooms in other apartments.
She texted me while I was sitting on a bus: Can you cast a spell or something so that I really like and sign this apartment that I am seeing tonight?
Now, this friend does not believe in magic, and whenever I've suggested that she try reiki or mantra chanting or some other hippie-dippie meditation, magic, energy stuff that I’m into, she's laughed and said with great conviction: I am not doing that.
So I could only take her request for magical assistance as a true reflection of just how much she wanted to move. Which was very, very much. Desperately much. And so I sat there on the bus and “cast a spell."
Playing with Magic
From the outside, this looked a lot like sitting with my eyes closed while breathing deeply, and on the inside, it felt a lot like asking for her to find a home. I repeated the request, breathing until I grew hot - a heat stretching up my back - and I opened my eyes.
"I don't know exactly what a prayer is...
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?"
Mary Oliver
Later that night, she told me that the apartment hadn't been right, that she wanted that feeling where she walked in and just knew, and she told me she was willing to wait, that she knew it might take patience and time - maybe even a few months.
The next day at noon - just an hour before the start of this year's last lunar eclipse - I felt the same heat I'd felt the night before on the bus, and I felt strongly that this was the day she'd find her home. I texted: If an apartment catches your eye, I suggest you go look at it ASAP.
She replied - laughing - because she had just completed an application and made a deposit on a a new place.
She'd seen the listing that morning while sitting in her office by Grand Central, and she'd planned to make an appointment to go see it after work, but something told her go now - so she took the train from Grand Central to Greenpoint, and she walked into the apartment, and she just knew.
The Reality
Many other people saw the apartment that day. Many other people wanted to rent it, but something had told her go now, and she listened, and so she was the first person to see it, and it became hers, and unlike the places she'd seen in nights before, it wasn't just a room. It was four rooms, an entire apartment, all her own. A place free from any potential roommate theft. A place where her piano fits perfectly along the wall between the window and the fireplace. A place where she is happy.
I told her then how I hadn't actually cast the spell she'd requested, that instead I'd asked for her to find a space where she would feel happy and free. A space that would nourish where she is and help her get wherever she wants to go. And I'd asked that she find it quickly, like, by the end of the week.
Maybe it was the eclipse or the spell or a happy coincidence. All I know is that this is what happened:
It worked, she said.
*When I told my friend I was writing this story about her, she asked if I was calling it "Supergirl." At which point I could only reply, of course.