52. Buckle Up

The Obsessive Diary · Nov 9, 2025 · 3m

He went to Mexico for the summer to see his teacher leaving me in charge of the sweat lodge altar. I cleaned and lit and waved incense and genuflected but the candles turned black. He said it was an attack, he was always in battle with dark forces. I wrote my first novel over those six weeks, a story of a girl who goes to India and loses her mind. When he returned, I put it in a drawer. We went to Italy to run a sweat lodge on the shores of a lake near Rome. We went to Wales to collect more basalt for the lodge at home. I went to Valencia for a month in an effort to keep up with his Spanish…