Welcome to a series of posts related to Halloween 2024!  Holen has written some guest posts, and I have my own bag of treats planned.  Enjoy!

RECORD STORE TALES #1158: I dated a witch!

 

A sequel to #904:  2000 Dates and #616:  None of My Exes Live in Texas

 

I have held off telling this tale long enough!  There are many reasons why I haven’t told this story until now, but here are the two main ones:

1. I didn’t want to upset my grandmother.
2. I don’t know anything about witchcraft at all, therefore I don’t want to seem like I’m making fun of someone’s religion.

However, I also think it’s amusing to say the sentence, “I dated a witch once”.  So here we go.

I explained in Record Store Tales #904:  2000 Dates, I did a lot of online dating in the year 2000.  Every time, it seemed the girl had something unique about her.  For example:

1. One girl was the cousin of Haywire singer Paul MacAusland, and suffered from I osteogenesis imperfecta, the same disease that affected Mr. Glass in the Unbreakable trilogy.  We went out once, and she wasn’t into me.
2. Another girl was in AA and I actually attended a meeting with her, which was a bad idea.  We went out a few times.  She wasn’t sure if she wanted a friend or a boyfriend, so I stopped calling her.
3. One was legally blind!  She got into that movie The Cell with Jennifer Lopez and Vincent D’onofrio for free.  She was starting a new life in a new town and I don’t think I was her best prospect.  I stopped hearing from her, until one day she accidentally emailed me.  I think we went out twice total.  She had awesome black dreads.

This story is about none of those women.

Cynthia was from Toronto.  She shared her surname with a prominent Star Trek character.  She was into Sloan and A Perfect Circle.  She took horrible care of her CDs.  We wanted to listen to music, and I suggested 4 Nights at the Palais Royale by Sloan, but the discs were all mixed up in her collection.  I knew it wasn’t going to work out.

We had one day together.  I drove up to Toronto, got lost, and had a huge panic attack on my way there.  No GPS, but I did have a cell phone.  That was actually the end right there.  It had nothing to do with her.  It was the drive.  I knew I’d never do that drive again.

Besides listening to music, I watched Cynthia work.  She was an online psychic.  I’m a sceptic, but the kind that would like to be convinced.  She got on her computer, opened a word file, and began responding to emails.  She scrolled through her word file, found a paragraph she liked, and hit “copy”.  “This one will work,” she said.  She had all her “psychic” readings pre-written; she just selected one that applied to the question.  “I do real ones sometimes,” she justified to me.  Sometimes.  Not that night though.

We went for a walk, we talked, and Cynthia tried to explain her religion to me.  She was a “weather witch”, she told me.  She practiced Wicca.  Wicca and witchcraft, she explained, were not interchangeable terms, but she was both.  I was pretty clear that I was comfortable where I was spiritually, but hey, cool.  I very much had a “you do you” attitude when it came to religion.  We were both raised Catholic, so we had that in common.  She had two roommates, also Wiccan.  They had a picture up in their main entrance of their horned god, which was interesting, but they didn’t laugh when I commented that their god appeared “horny”.  Come on, cut the new guy some slack!

I made it home on Highway 401 in one piece.  I knew I’d never be going back.  It was a matter of telling her.  She did not take it well.

Cynthia had made for me a little magic pouch to protect me on the highway.  When I told her I could not do that drive again, she was quite upset.  “I’ll take the bus to you!” she offered.  There were tears…I felt awful.  I had described her as a “stage 5 clinger” before, which is unkind but not untrue.  It was the first time I had experienced something like this.  I went from indifferent dates, to this!

I went out the night of that phone call with some friends to a round of mini-golf.  It helped me get my mind off things.  I shared that I was slightly afraid she’d cast a spell on me.  You always say “Oh but magic and witches aren’t real,” but I thought, “Cynthia didn’t think so.”  What’s real?  And what the hell did I know at age 28?   We laughed a lot during that round of mini-golf, but then my friend Will prank called my car phone pretending to be an angry friend of Cynthia’s.  That took some calming down after.  Later, I was teased at a staff party by my co-workers about the kinds of spells she would put on me for dumping her.  You can see why I haven’t told this story before.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to all these people I went out with during that period of time.  Married, with adult kids now?  Do they even remember me?  I’m the one writing all this; maybe I’m the clinger after all.