“And as to accosting it, I dare not, I could not; when I see it, I am powerless…” – The Watcher and Other Weird Stories by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, 1851.

I can see it out of the corner of my eye, on my right side.  Just…sitting.  Waiting.  Waiting to come alive…waiting for me to make a move.   It is dark, and scary – terrifying, even.

I can’t look upon it directly, lest my unease turn to panic.  No, just knowing it is there is more than enough to upset my calm mood and increase the dread that I first felt when it so easily invaded my bedroom.  I sometimes rue the day I so cavalierly invited it in, but I had experienced such a compulsion – maybe even an obsession – regarding it that, inevitably, my fate was securely tied to it and its mystifying aura.  A fate I encouraged to manifest, it’s true, but I was helpless.  Helpless and now too full of pride to send it back on its way.  A witch, after all, should not be so afraid of the unknown!

So it sits and waits, uncaring that I am surreptitiously watching it, and it is oblivious to my anxiety.  To say it had no feelings one way or another about my discomfort would be a vast understatement!  I think, in some impossible way, it knows I will have to address it sooner than later, but it has time…all the time in the world.

It’s true that I can have an inexplicable nervousness about me at times, and it is also true that I have had many experiences with things I do not understand but…there they are in front of me.  I can live with a certain amount of ambiguity in my life.  I can also live with rituals that have unintended outcomes, experiments that make things worse, and even the eye-rolls of certain people who think I really ought to know better.  ‘Forge on!” say I.  “Life’s full of adventures!” I exclaim.

But this…it’s almost too frightening to bear!  I didn’t think I would be so completely unprepared but it’s painfully clear just how much I had deluded myself into thinking this was something I could easily handle.  No, this will be one of the toughest and most terrifying challenges I have faced in a long time.  Does anyone blame me for putting off confronting it?