Love and Voodoo Dolls.

This last week I couldn't help but reflect on love and in the process remembered this little gem of a memory. How far would you go to get someone else's love and attention? Everyone does strange things sometimes but for my sister the want for someones love and attention made her do something extraordinarily odd.

Everyday my mother would pick my two sisters and I up from school in an old little blue ford sedan. My sisters were both older than me and in high school while I was barely reaching the end of elementary but the back of my mother's car was where all the gossip was told. They would take turns while my mom took the winding neighborhood roads back home telling my mother everything at a mile a minute as she juggled her facial expressions between a look of amusement and concern. Having my sisters let it all out there in her little old car so that it might never make its way to the ears of my father.

On this day as my eldest sister climbed into the car she seemed upset and without little prompting from anyone started telling my mother and other sister that a boy at school didn't want to date her. I guess she went out of her way to talk to this boy because she had become kind of popular at the time and he didn't notice or care for any of her efforts at all. She felt jilted and more than a little irritated because according to her he was weird and not even cool. In her own words from the 90's "The kind of guy that writes porn during lunch with his friends", and yes, she actually said that last part. Everything she told us about him was unlikable but she was still angry about the fact that he wasn't pining away after her or striving to bask in her popular glow.

 They all talked about these things as I sat there half listening. I always wondered if they just assumed my ears were auto deleting the overly grown up parts I wasn't supposed to hear. Although it didn't matter much because what little I did take into my brain I would forget about with coming week since none of it held any importance in my world. Either way as the little car pushed forward I placed my face near the window and watched the trees sway wondering if magic was real.
After this I can't recall exactly how it happened while I was going about my business being a kid, I noticed my recently jilted sister spending more time with my father.
(My father, the man who I worry knows more than he will ever say.)

Within the next couple of days I remember him telling her things, things that I remember made me feel like we were in a ghost story. It was all hard to make out but it was something about needing to sew it herself and she was going to need a large jar. Then later I saw them in the kitchen sewing what looked like a creepy lumpy doll out of all white fabric. It was hard to hear what they were saying I can't remember if they were whispering or not anymore but every word seemed to be spoken in a way that gave you the feeling the speaker wished their words had never been said.

  Then the next day after school they buried it in the backyard.

Whatever it was, voodoo or other wise that white lumpy doll went in the jar and was buried underground. I saw them from the back of the kitchen and stayed out of the way, out of sight although I don't think it would have mattered if they had seen me.
I didn't ask any questions, this was not the strangest thing I had seen in my house and Power Rangers were probably on the t.v. After that I just remember, this high school boy came out of nowhere and my sister instantly had a boyfriend. This usually would have been unnoticed if it wasn't for his odd behavior, he was just all over her. When they were together we would see him gazing at her intensely for long periods of time buying her flowers, trinkets and stuffed animals. Later I would realize it was him, he was the same boy who didn't like my sister and now he had flipped like a switch, it had worked. It seemed unreal to me as I watched from the sidelines. He seemed so intense that even my mother became worried, so much in fact that she made me chaperone one of their dates.

 (Which I hated at the time but I totally understand now because side note: my super power is killing the sexual tension in any room, any where, any time.)

Anyways soon they were in "love" and he was calling our house incessantly when they were not together. This went on for what I think was 2 weeks or so.

Then early one morning out of the blue he called my sister and said very blatantly that he wanted to break up. I still remember her panicking angrily on the phone while yelling, "So what you just woke up this morning and didn't love me anymore!"

To which I am a one hundred percent sure his answer was simply "yes." The phone call ended pretty quickly since he didn't seem to want to talk much to her about it and she grabbed some of the things he gave her and broke them belligerently while crying. When after running out of things to tear apart or break it seemed to occur to her that she had forgotten something important. She immediately went outside and started digging in the soft recently overturned soil of the backyard. My father went out there a few minutes later and told her to stop digging. To which she replied, "Where is it?," Then he told her that he had already dug it out the night before. She was even more livid and asked again where it was. My father told her he had thrown it away and looking solemn told her something like, "Honey its time." Telling her that he had let this go on for too long and that now she knows if he really loves her or not.

I remember thinking to myself, this is real magic not dainty fairies and pixie dust but crudely sewn dolls that can make you feel things that are untrue to yourself. It was disheartening to think that someone could make you feel lies and there would never be a rescue because who would think to look for freshly turned soil when you were acting strange. That and something about that doll never seemed right as it sat in that stuffy noiseless jar underground. I am glad its gone and that boy can go back to not liking my sister.

I will end the memory there since this is kind of a weird story on its own.

So there it is, love. Love makes you do crazy things.