I have a Whatsapp call scheduled and I’m meeting up at a friend’s house who speaks Spanish so they can translate between me and Yanza Tormenta, the witch who is phoning in from outside Mexico City. It feels like incredibly dire times and when we get on the call, Yanza Tormenta confirms just as much.
There is a man in the life of my best friend who, without intervention, is sucking the life out of her, and without intervention, her life will end. He has been playing with dark energy. There are drugs involved. He has identified me as a threat to his plan, and is trying to make me lose my mind so I am institutionalized. I am incredibly rational and have always been the stable one. I agree wholeheartedly that this is all true, and I have deeply felt the disorientation. Worry for my friend has turned into strange thoughts and a collapsing sense of self. I arrived here because I awoke one morning with a strong inclination that I needed spiritual help.
We were both raised Catholic. We made all our sacraments together. I’ve always had a sense that she was more spiritual than I. When we were 11, sitting on a bench in a concrete playground, my best friend asked me if we should take a vow and get purity rings, before going into 6th grade. Her older brother told her that girls he knew who went to our specific middle school became sluts. I expressed some apprehension, I kinda just wanted to see how things would play out in middle school, and I was also going through a short phase where discussion of sex, even about avoiding it, was mortifying. I also realized the motivation for this question was probably a recent South Park episode we had watched, mocking the Jonas Brothers. We had never discussed chastity at our generally liberal Catholic Church. However, it was vaguely worrying me, that detail about those mysterious older girls, now sluts. We made an informal virginity pact and left it there.
By the end of the next school year, I found out a lot about what my best friend was going through by scrolling her tumblr page, and reading her personal text posts. She was an incredible poet of angst, and it was all conveniently private. I saw her every day but would never directly bring up those thoughts. She would bring up mine openly and curiously, to where it almost felt diminishing, like my private tumblr thoughts were less ominous and mysterious, and more generally approachable to the IRL. One day she posted that she met and spoke to Jesus in a moment of crisis. I had to Google whether these were lyrics from a likely midwestern Christian screamo band. I confirmed they were her words and I was shocked. We were from Brooklyn, New York and went to public school. You meet Jesus in the Church, not your neon green bedroom. Despite this, I wholeheartedly believed her.
Yanza Tormenta has me and my translator get out a paper and a pen for a shopping list. I nod along eagerly. I didn’t know too much about what this tradition was about before arriving, I knew it was a “last resort” type of situation. I also knew I was going to be spending a lot of money on supplies, as well as the services of Yanza Tormenta.
“She wants you to know she’s a real witch.” My friend translates. Her tone is sing-songy and humorous. Before giving us the ritual shopping list, she shows us around her apartment through the video call, filled with varying sized statues of deities from different global traditions of home made magic. Giant platters of fruit and alcohol on fold out tables lined the perimeter of every room. Each deity is decorated with stacks of gold jewelry. Outside her home, there is a courtyard with a totem pole in the center, which looks scorched. I express being highly impressed. Yanza Tormenta directs my friend to translate that I would look good with bangs and highlights in my hair.
At this point in the WhatsApp consultation session I put together all the pieces to my whole life leading to this moment. Even the YouTube algorithm felt fated in our direction, which had brought my translator friend a low-views video of Yanza Tormenta. I had received that scholarship to college so I could have autonomy over money, just enough that I could do whatever it takes to free my best friend. The Westchester town outside my college just happened to be majority Spanish-speaking. It would have a botanica, where I could get the type of candles I needed to do this ritual.
I also learn from this call, and the next few days of emotionally intense preparations and a series of guided whatsapp rituals that this tradition is a “come as you are” situation. I could pray the prayers I had learned in Sunday school to access whatever spirituality I had been raised with. I could substitute certain bush flowers native to central Mexico for a flower I could find near the checkout at Stop & Shop. I could enter and sit in the only clean, fast running “river” in the NYC metro area to complete the ritual, through a housing complex in Greenwich, Connecticut, where we tell local police officers we are doing a video art project for the nearby college. I don’t burn the tall candles down to the bottoms, because I’m fearful of setting my shared college house on fire if I leave them burning overnight.
All of this “works'' either immediately or eventually. I don’t see the work I did as an act of saving my best friend’s life, even though it is an attractive narrative. My best friend will bring it up casually to strangers, to brag about me, and how much I care. It’s just an odd thing that happened, or a *random* time where I followed an esoteric thought to its logical conclusion- where I went all in on something.
I distance myself from my translator friend who keeps some contact with the witch we worked with. I feel awkwardly self aware of my emotionality, and looseness with money I had during that contact. I started avoiding tarot, and astrology. Both my best friend and I try out Catholicism again even though everyone starts admonishing it as a meme. I go to Church for the first time since our confirmation 10 years ago. I got a cross from Etsy, and had it blessed by a priest. I feel cowardly about confession, where I used to make up lies for fun. I sometimes get the Eucharist anyway.
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