November the 18^th is an auspicious day for me; snug in the heart of Scorpio season.  I love Scorpios and prefer them when everyone else seems to prefer not to.  November the 18^th, a seemingly innocuous drizzle of daylight stuck somewhere between Samhain and Thanksgiving, but it likes to change my life.  A lot. 

The first time November the 18^th decided to have its way with me was roughly 25 years ago in different parts of the world, when not one but two extraordinary men that would come into my life much later on were born.  I met one of them in Sweden; under a midnight sun with a glow-in-the-dark-smile, wearing all black and draping his substantially long limbs over whatever happened to be near.  We regarded each other with interest and a smug elitism, which later blossomed into a desert-born friendship and proved durable through many tests.  It also gave rise to some of the best letters I’ve ever written or received.  One corner of my heart now reaches all the way to Norway.  Happy Birthday Lucian.

I met the other a scant two months later, standing nekkid on a podium for a roomful of artists.  We went for a coffee:  me-“You’re a Scorpio aren’t you?”  him-“Obviously.”  me-“When’s your birthday?” him-“November 18^th.”  me-“Obviously.”  I had learned to pay attention.  I will not go into detail but suffice to say: without the month that I had in the company of this person, a great rent in my making wouldn’t have healed and I’d be even more neurotic than I currently am.  I’d also know nothing of Ivan Aivazovsky and have a great deal less beautiful beyond measure moments to look back on with a distant ember and a smile.  This is to the Armenian: thank you, and also, happy birthday. 

November the 18^th has been the day I realized I was falling in love and, years later, out of it.  It’s been the day, a scant two and a half weeks after the forming of our Coven, that I realized I would never stop feeling the physical absence of my sisters.  Even now, four years later and us scattered over the states, I can feel all of them. 

And seven years ago today, in the cold, close, strobe-lit expanse of a cave in Tennessee, I was 18 years old.  The bass of the music was so loud that the collected puddles in roped-off caverns shook in time; it was the soundtrack of my life.  I sat in a sprawling clump of 18-23 year old raver kids all cooing at each other and turned to my left, where I looked for the first time into the eyes of a boy who would become a part of me down to the blood.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I would come to love this boy fiercely.  And over seven years the boy becomes a man, and collects his own pains and joys and trials and secrets, and he shares them with me.  And now it is November 18^th again, and I am 25.  I can look down and see his signature in my skin, and a 25 cent ring that he wishes I wouldn’t wear because it’s too sharp, and the pentagram that I wore in every ritual since the day he gave it to me, and the well of him in my ribcage that goes on and on and on…

Again, I will not go into detail.  The point of this whole too public emotive blog is this: you never know what day is going to leave you altered forever.  My guess is that the best thing to do is try to pay attention.