Chapter 42

Chapter 42 of 48 · 7-minute read

Fixed Star Lesath in Jesse’s Natal Twelfth House

My breath catches in my chest. I remember the other side of this scene. The call from Jesse’s cop-buddy. Arriving at the ER, terrified, only to discover Jesse wasn’t there. And that he was nowhere to be found. Just… gone.

I lived the days after that—the rumors of drug abuse, that narcotics were found in his car but covered up by small town friends who adored their Dr. Jesse, the concerns over a possible dalliance with a frequent patient who had abruptly quit the clinic after the accident. Dealing with Jesse’s insurance company, the bank, patients at the clinic who wondered where he was and when he was coming back. Trying to think of the right thing to say to Sonnet through her own grief and then her growing anger, followed by her refusal to speak of him.

Everything was left for me to take care of, and I just shut down. Jan had said I was comatose with grief.

I’d barely seen him in the two weeks before. I’d spent most of my days crying because I couldn’t understand what was happening to my perfect life.

Jesse ghosted me that night as surely as if he’d actually died.

Sure, there had been sightings of him over the past two months, but they were fewer and fewer, ending with a report of seeing someone who looked a bit like him, but unkempt and much older, and then Christabel’s report of seeing someone who looked like him at the new Thai restaurant, the one next to the RV camp at the lake where Bianca had rented an old RV for the week of Winter Solstice but had continued to rent from month to month.

I can’t breathe. I try to pull away, but the light around Jesse holds me in place, tighter than any ropes or bonds.

“I don’t want to see anything more,” I yelp. If I allow myself to think about him with this woman and not with me, no matter the circumstances, the jealousy will eat me alive. Already, I’m seeing images in my head of the two of them fucking like rabbits in her RV and the woods and the moonlit lake at night. I have no idea if these are visions of the truth or mirages I’ve conjured to torture myself.

“Just a little more,” he whispers.

His memories spin past me.

Listless days and nights in Bianca’s RV, with her moods alternating between angry and lustful. Her yelling at him that this wasn’t what she wanted and why won’t he touch her? Him still trying to figure out how he’d mistaken Bianca for Lauren and how he’d started this path of destruction and wondering if he’d been hallucinating because of the pills he’d taken that day at the clinic.

When he runs out of the pills he had in his pocket, he explores anything and everything Bianca cooks up from herbs in her pantry. Every attempt to numb his pain makes it worse.

“I loved you so much, Wifey, but I kept doing things that were bad for me, one after another, to make myself feel better, and if I couldn’t feel better, then I didn’t want to feel anything at all.”

In one last flash of memory, I see through Jesse’s eyes as he finishes some mind-numbing tea Bianca made for the two of them that makes him feel like he’s flying when she does her own witchy chants around her campfire or arms raised to the full moon above the lake. Not an alcoholic drink but definitely a mood-lightening drug meant to be taken in limited amounts. But the limited amounts are too little. He needs more today to numb the pain than yesterday.

He stares into the bottom of the white mug stolen from the Thai restaurant where Bianca sometimes works for cash tips. It’s as empty as his soul.

He pours another and drinks it quickly, but the hole in his heart only grows.

He pours another and the world turns gray as he finishes it. Bianca’s screaming in the background, but he doesn’t care anymore. He tries for a moment to tether himself to the sounds of her screams but he floats in some kind of euphoric dream. Try as he might, he can’t hang onto reality.

After that, the memories blur, full of murkiness and eventually darkness.

I hold Jesse to me and swim through grief, anger, bitterness. He made one mistake due to a trick of magick, but all the rest are on him. Damn him for not simply staying on his medications and talking to me about his fears. He’d failed to deal with his, then run away from dealing with it, then avoided me, and instead of coming to the person who loved him most in the world, he ran to Bianca.

I shove down all my emotions. I can’t afford to feel them all, so I make myself feel nothing but the numbness.

“It’s time for you to get on with your life, Lauren. I’m not coming back. No matter how much I want to make everything right, sometimes you just can’t.” He kisses my forehead just above my nose, then pulls back to look into my eyes. “You know what you have to do. You have to cut the cords—because I can’t. I’m not as strong as you are. I never was.”

I know he’s right. It’s time to let go. I always thought our marriage and our relationship would last forever. I never dreamed it would turn on a dime. And if I’m the stronger of the two of us, what does that say about how far-gone Jesse is? I’m so fatigued. I don’t feel like I have strength enough to forgive or to release but letting go takes more effort than holding onto something that no longer exists. He’s not dead but Jesse—my Jesse—is a ghost to me. Even if he could fix everything that’s gone wrong, I can never trust him again. Not that I blame him for Bianca’s glamour, but because he pulled back his energy and life force from me, and I could never be certain that it wouldn’t happen again.

I can’t plead with him to stay and never leave me. I have to give up on him.

I know what I have to do.

“My sweetest Jesse.” My voice cracks. “I, your wifey, your lover, your friend, your Lauren, forgive you and release you for all the wrongs, both real and imagined, intentional and unintentional, seen and unseen, that you have done to me from the beginning of time until the present. I forgive you, and I release you.”

I feel him scream, but all I hear is a whimper. He doesn’t move or push away.

“Jesse, my beloved husband, lover, and friend, I ask that you forgive and release me for all the wrongs I’ve done you, both real and imagined, intentional and unintentional, seen and unseen, that I have done to you from the beginning of time until the present. For these things, I ask you to forgive and release me.”

He nods but doesn’t let go. “I loved you, Wifey. Never doubt that.”

Light swirls around us. I can’t see any attachments we have on one another. No golden chains or string or grappling hooks on rope to bind us together. No spiderwebs or twine or human intestines or kudzu vines or anything else I’ve ever seen. No energetic bonds that drag either of us down or drain the life out of the other. Just light pulsing off his skin and mine like rays of sunshine.

I try to take a small step backward, but I can’t move. My light is tangled up in his, almost solid. The glow of us together extends beyond my fire circle, but how far, I cannot tell. When I try to separate, our conjoined light feels like molasses in wintertime everywhere our skin touches, and inches away from where we don’t touch.

Ohhhhhh.

The bonds between us don’t show themselves as anything so common as ropes or anything I might expect from him, like guitar strings or medical gauze. Our bonds are the enmeshed beams of light. I can’t find a beginning or end to the sphere around us. It’s beautiful… until it’s not.

It’s suddenly suffocating. I’m drowning in it. I can’t pull free. I’m trapped. I’m all the things Jesse has felt since the Winter Solstice and maybe before.

I wrench backwards as hard as I can. The light between and around us pulls apart like stretched taffy but doesn’t break. The golden light around him takes on a darker hue below the surface. The harder I pull away and the thinner the light grows around him, the darker the bond between us.

I conjure a sword of energy and light in my right hand—the largest and longest magickal tool I’ve ever used on the astral plane—and bring it smashing down on the stretched rays of light between us. Like taffy stretched to its limit and frozen, the light between us shatters.

The golden light around me sheathes me like a warm second skin and immediately fills any wounds. I am nothing but light and energy, and just that quickly, I feel weightless. All the heaviness of these last six months is gone, just as if I’d taken stretched taffy from the freezer and broken off a piece.

But the light around Jesse thaws in shades of gold and brown and black, the latter at the center.

Then the rays of light in all their colors, wither as though a vine deprived of nutrients. All the light—gold, brown, and everything between—turns black and shatters. This solid form of Jesse’s higher self, lent to me for the purpose of this releasing ritual, shows a hull of the man I knew. As the molasses-thick light falls away, so do his outer features, leaving inches-deep rot of what was once his chest and face. That part of him is gone, all the way to the decay in his brain, his ethereal body decomposing.

I recoil in horror.

Screams fill my ears.

Not Jesse’s, but mine.

← Chapter 41
Chapter 43 →

You’re reading Rite of Letting Go free, right here in the Library. Want a copy to keep on your Kindle or e-reader? Buy the e-book direct from me →