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The Hag finds her way through me, wrecking my cute little notions of self love as she dips my body in the scents of her ugliness. 'Do you still love yourself now' she taunts, stealing my beauty more each day. No matter how I try to hide or drape myself in robes of perfection, she finds her way through the battered, beaten down spaces within me.
I see her reflected in my mothers eyes, like a dagger upon my flesh threatening me not to look away. I notice every red blotch upon her skin, every wrinkle and blemish, the dull coarseness of her hair, the yellow teeth interspersed between the missing ones that leave little black holes in her mouth and the dry cracks that cover her lips like the parched trails upon a desert landscape.
'This will be you someday' she whispers in my ear with a raspy hiss, 'you are not so different, pretty child, you are not immune to my touch and you can not cheat your way out of life's fleshy pulse.' Her words ring in my ears over and over like the echo of a loud gong hitting every corner of my mind. 'You can not smoothen what is destined to be rough, those tricks are but an illusion- silly woman' she scoffs. 'Your paint may fool an onlooker but it will never dull my emergence within the dark hallways of your psyche.'
I look at my mother as lovingly as I can, I try not to be repulsed by the terror of my own aging reflection and I ponder how brutal bodily enchantment can be. This now haggish woman, my mother, once a raging beauty without a drop of modesty- oh she knew the power of her exotic looks and oozing sexuality like a cat knows its own purr. It was as plain to her and everyone else as the stars are to darkness and she cringed at all who did not meet those same standards. What a cruel, crude joke! One that is already sinking its claws ever deeper into my own vanity, pressing upon my chest until I can not ignore it a breath longer.
No one can quite understand the insidious underling terror that accompanies witnessing your own mothers sudden demise as swift as a gust of wind unless they have experienced it for themselves.
It's easy to wax lyrical about the hag while one is still ripe as a freshly picked peach in summer; skin smooth, eyes bright, a well of juicy buoyancy seeping from your sex; but when she begins to make her unmistakable claims upon your flesh you may find yourself turning to run as fast as you can. She is not faint of heart or light in step and she does not care for any of the lies you tell yourself. She pierces your masks with one simple look, getting right to the core of your truth. She doesn't care for your fancy words or elaborate stories.
She is raw, like a heart freshly broken, she is wild, like a lion protecting her cubs, and she holds wisdom, like a drop of water that has circled the earth for millennia.
The Hag has come to reside in pathology because we have made her an outcast of her own domain. We have banished her from our glossy garden of pretty things and we have disinfected anything that resembles her wild, unruly, untethered ways. We have learned to loathe what we perceive as the weakness of death and decay. But we can never make it, or her, go away.
When we are willing to fall apart and meet our own pathology, our own madness; in the truest, messiest sense of the word; we simultaneously meet our Hag. Upon meeting her we must choose to keep looking her in the eye without trying to cleanse her, purify her or make her pretty and palatable. For she is not concerned with purification or cleansing, she's not looking for enlightenment or salvation, she simply is what she is- the last turning of the cyclic wheel in which all must return to in the end.
It is one great feat to truly meet the Hag in ones self, so much so that many would not even know where to begin, neither why to try. My only advice as I too wrestle myself towards surrendering into her arms is to let go! Pull up a seat at the table of splendour for all your perceived flaws and foibles, stop looking away from your ugliness and pause before rushing to cover it all up. Instead, romance these places with the persistence of a lovers longing and dance with them under the moonlight.
Fall into the realms of not needing to know, for this is her home, and bit by bit allow glimpses of her dark hues to burst through you into the light of day so others can meet her too.
Xx Vanessa
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