Year of the Inner Goddess

June 2026 – Listen Here

I am at rock bottom once more, cradling a fractured heart in trembling hands.

My soul wept because she recognized this abyss. She knew its contours intimately – the familiar descent, the suffocating dark, the chthonic ache of realizing that we must once again claw ourselves skyward. The darkness was impenetrable, tenebrous, and alive, its walls rising sheer and merciless around me. Hoary demons stirred within its depths, whispering old accusations in familiar voices. Far overhead, maternal love remained the only distant pinprick of light. Forty years upon this earth, and still grief discovers new doorways through which to enter. 

I had built my citadel so high, its ramparts thick with vows and old scar tissue. Never again, I had sworn. Never again would I find myself here.

I had promised the little girl within me – the one who survived every previous cataclysm – that I would never again abandon her to such desolation. I would choose differently. I would build walls that no threat could breach.

And yet…

There I was, knees bloodied upon unseen stones, folded into myself, my ribs aching from the effort of containing a sorrow too immense for flesh. Each breath caught halfway to my lungs, as though anguish itself had wrapped spectral fingers around my throat. My chest felt exsanguinated, withered. Something ancient and beloved had been torn from me, leaving only an echo behind.

I mourned not merely the loss before me, but every abandonment, every betrayal, every funeral my spirit had ever survived. Grief is a curious thing. It does not arrive alone. It brings its ancestors.

Worse still, when I searched for the architect of my suffering, I found only myself. There were my own bloodied hands, my fingers still wrapped about the hilt of the blade. I had been the one sawing through the tethers of my own heart. 

I had chosen this severing.

I had spoken the words.

I had walked away.

I had promised the little girl within me that I would keep her safe, and yet in that terrible hour, I could not distinguish salvation from slaughter. Had I rescued us, or had I simply slaughtered the thing we loved and christened the carnage wisdom?

Reason offered no solace.

Love still reached for him in the darkness.

My flesh still sought the familiar geography of his beside me. 

My soul still whispered his name into the silence and waited, foolishly, for an answer. 

And so I wept – not merely as mourner, but as executioner standing beside the grave she herself had dug, staring in horror at the devastation she had wrought and wondering whether she had buried her future alongside it. 

Tequila had served as my ferryman across sorrow’s river. We were mere acquaintances, that crystal spirit and I, yet on this night it escorted me faithfully through the shadowlands and into my cavern of brokenness.

She took my hand.

A presence gathered me to her bosom – oracular, maternal, enchanted. 

The refuge glowed beneath strands of tiny constellations suspended overhead, while rose and crimson lamplight painted the walls in shades of dusk and devotion. Candles flickered from every surface, their flames reaching heavenward as though engaged in silent incantation. Dried herbs hung in fragrant bundles from dark wooden beams. Crystals caught the firelight in forgotten corners, casting fractured rainbows across crimson walls. The air carried traces of copal, wildflowers, and something ineffably feminine, as though generations of women had left fragments of their prayers lingering there.

There were others there. I remember tears brushed from my cheeks by weathered hands, voices murmuring near my ear – salutations, blessings, or perhaps simply love offered freely. My recollections remain dreamlike and lacunose, scattered like pressed flowers loosed from a weathered journal, beautiful but impossible to reassemble. 

Outside, creatures of the night announced themselves in mournful chorus. Claws scraped against glass. Whispers rode upon the wind. Friend or foe? I did not care. Indeed, I almost willed them to claim me. Somewhere beyond the sentinel trees, a solitary cry pierced the darkness, raw and soul-sick. It echoed skyward, wavering in supplication to the Moon Goddess, yet even she had veiled her face. Was it a creature, or merely my own heart splintering anew?

Her inner sanctum seemed to recognize sorrow. It welcomed it. I had the uncanny impression that women had crossed this threshold for centuries, carrying shattered hearts, and here, beneath watchful stars and chapel-glow, had been permitted to unravel without shame. The walls themselves felt steeped in remembrance, as though they had absorbed centuries of tears and held each one in sacred confidence. 

Inside, time surrendered.

Sister. Mother. Enchantress. Companion. Lover.

No single title could contain what she became that evening.

She gathered me into a cocoon woven from compassion and elder magic, granting sanctuary to the tempest raging within my breast. At last, my anguish no longer had to batter itself against my own bones.

My mascara had long since vanished. Anguish surged through me in great tidal waves. Rage followed. Then despair. Then a terrible numbness, as though my heart, having bled itself dry, had simply ceased its protest. 

I drifted between waking and dreaming, inhabiting that peculiar threshold where reality loosens its grip and one exists both within and beyond one’s own mortal body, emotionally blunted and unstitched from ordinary consciousness. 

I came to her, bloodied by my own hand, convinced I had become the villain in my own tale. Surely she would see what I saw – a woman too fearful to trust love, too weary to continue, too damaged to deserve staying.

She saw none of those things.

Or perhaps she saw them all and loved me still.

She did not argue. She did not offer the absolution I begged for. She simply gathered me closer, as though shattered hearts were not aberrations to be hidden, but vestal relics deserving tenderness.

There was grief.

Vast and tidal

Enough desolation to drown a lesser version of myself. In that moment, I was uncertain whether I possessed the strength – the fortitude – to survive this familiar storm. Not again. Not after all the vows I had made to the little girl within.

I had promised her harbor.

I had promised her peace.

I had promised that no one would ever abandon her again.

Instead, with executioner’s bloody hands, I had led her back into the darkness, into the waiting jaws of rot-born demons whose names we had both memorized long ago. 

I had sworn I would protect her.

I had failed.

Worse still, I feared I had become the very thing from which I had always sought to shield her.

I had let her down.

Failed her.

And somewhere deep within, I imagined I could hear her small, bewildered voice asking only one question. 

“Why?”

I wept an ocean.

Yet this time, there was a sentinel.

There is sacred alchemy in being truly seen in one’s suffering – when another soul does not retreat, does not rush toward repair, but instead climbs willingly into the abyss and keeps vigil beside you in the unbearable void.

For one blessed interval, at the very nadir of despair, I was not alone.

My storm was permitted its full voice.

Her inner chamber did not recoil from anguish. It drew the ache inward like smoke, softened its edges, and held it in the rose-gold hush. The wax burned lower, gentler. Shadows lengthened across vermilion walls like atavistic hands reaching to soothe. The tiny stars suspended overhead gleamed patiently, as though they had kept watch over countless women before me – women who had arrived weeping, raging, undone.

The room knew this ritual.

Women had crossed this threshold before carrying the ashes of their former lives. Perhaps even the Goddess herself had wept her own glittering tears here, my fresh sorrows mingling with those shed long ago. 

The room had survived every one of them.

And sheltered within her arms, anguish I had believed long buried rose from catacombs long sealed. I cursed. I wept. I howled until my throat grew raw and my muscles shook with fatigue. 

Still, she remained.

She remained when my tears turned to fury.

She remained when fury collapsed into despair.

She remained when I confessed the terrible fear that I had destroyed the thing I cherished, that I had become the betrayer in my own tragedy. 

She abided when I had nothing beautiful left to offer. I brought my devastation to her doorstep, and she did not turn away. And her Bruja spellwork bore witness to it all.

Grief refused to remain content to dwell solely in the heart.

It inhabits the very architecture of ones being.

It settled like a malignancy behind my sternum, consuming light until only hollowness persisted. My throat constricted until each breath felt stolen rather than bestowed. It felt like the death of a star, my very being imploding. Sorrow lodged itself beneath my breastbone, heavy and immovable, a gnarled stone I had somehow mistaken for my own heart.

Yet anguish is capricious and seeks consolation in unexpected places.

Within that vesper chamber I found myself cherished. The room hummed with old feminine mysteries. Beeswax, incense, warm skin, and crushed herbs perfumed the air until breathing itself felt ceremonial. 

A fingertip brushed the column of my neck, and for the first time in days, I remembered that I possessed a body, not merely a reliquary for mourning. Another traced fragrant oil along the rigid line of my spine, each measured touch an invocation, each pass of her hands a benediction. The faint scent of copal clung to her skin, earthy and sacred, and I found myself breathing more deeply simply to remain near her. 

My flesh, which had spent endless days armored and held together by little more than stubbornness and fragile illusion, responded with a soft, involuntary sound. When she lifted the linen to shield my modesty, her palm briefly grazed me. Heat unfurled through me, startling in its immediacy. My breast, starved of attention, awakened all at once at the passing brush of her hand.

The gesture had been wholly innocent.

My response was not.

Yearning stirred before my fractured mind could object. Like embers buried beneath ash suddenly encountering air, my Inner Goddess, entombed beneath pillows, despondency, and despair, opened tear-soaked eyes.

Desire appeared. It startled me.

I had arrived carrying devastation. Desire had not been invited. My face was swollen and tear-stained. I did not dare seek my reflection. There was nothing desirable about me.

Yet she looked at me as though I were moonrise.

Perhaps to be desired is, in some small way, to be called back to life. Perhaps I longed to be known, even here in the deepest pit of despair. Perhaps I simply sought stillness in the eye of the hurricane – a sanctuary before the tempest resumed its assault.

I do not know.

I know only that something shifted within the enchantment. Trust. Longing. Mayhap lust. Whatever it was, I reached for her.

She met me there.

The first true kiss felt less like desire and more like absolution.

Like prayer.

Like being welcomed home to a forgotten temple within myself. 

The chamber held us gently. Crimson shadows drifted across the walls like watchful spirits. Candles flickered their fey blessings. Somewhere incense smoldered, sweet and resinous, transforming the air into something almost liturgical. 

Outside, the night prowled and mourned.

Inside, two women lay entwined beneath beeswax and constellations, sharing warmth, sorrow, breath, and whispered confessions.

She touched me with such exquisite certainty. There was nothing hesitant in her. 

She moved over and through my body with the quiet confidence of a woman who understood both melancholy and pleasure intimately, as though she had guided souls back from darkness before and knew precisely where to place her hands to coax life into dormant places. 

Not as though I were fragile.

Not as though I were broken.

But as though I were beloved.

She pressed a licentious kiss against my apex, then another to the swell of my inner thigh, each one unhurried, each one asking rather than taking. She gathered me against her, and for the first time in what felt like centuries, I allowed the full weight of my sorrow to rest against another soul. 

A fingertip traced the damp path left by tears along my cheek. She pressed featherlight lips against my brow, then another to my lips, savoring, reverent, tasting salt and bereavement alike. Somewhere between one breath and the next, grief transformed.

Not disappeared.

Transformed.

The air between us grew charged, heavy with incense, ash, and wanting.

I remember the warmth of her flesh gathered around mine, the cadence of her breath quickening, the velvet brush of curls against my face as she bent over me. Her sighs – low, feminine, utterly intoxicating – unraveled something deep within me.

I wanted to adore her.

I wanted to worship her.

I wanted, if only for a single luminous interval, to lose myself within the refuge she had created for that singular heartbeat.

She looked at me as though I were beautiful.

I looked at her as though she had conjured starlight from loss.

I allowed myself to be wanted. And wanted in return.

Enfolded within that womb of candlelight and spiced witchcraft, untethered from clocks, obligations, and ordinary reality, I surrendered to an experience unlike any I had known before. Sister. Enchantress. Lover. Priestess. She was all and none of these things, impossible to name and therefore all the more holy.

For one gilded interval, sorrow loosened its merciless grip.

I do not know when comfort became desire. 

Grief had hollowed me. She filled those hollow spaces with presence, with warmth, with breath, with longing. 

The space between us grew charged, humming with an ancient sensuous current. Every brush of skin felt amplified. Every kiss seemed to summon another. I found myself craving not escape, but closeness. Nearness. Her.

I craved the warmth of her laughter against my mouth, the opulent drag of her fingers caressing my pearl, the low, breathless sounds she made when pleasure overtook her. I craved her gaze – that dark, unwavering regard that made me feel less like a woman undone and more sylphlike.

Beneath her ministrations, brilliant lights burst behind my swollen eyes – fireworks against an endless midnight sky, stars exploding across the heavens of my consciousness. For one fleeting, merciful interval, pain relinquished its dominion.

There was unspeakable beauty. There were moments too sacred for language.

I remember only fragments: the brocade softness of her skin beneath my fingertips, the unfamiliar sweetness of her tongue, the heavy cadence of her breath against my cheek as pleasure claimed her. Each exhalation sending warmth through me like a whispered incantation. 

There was holiness there. A sacred beyond language.

I found myself astride her, twinkle lights gilding the exquisite landscape of her body in rose and amber. Beneath me lay not merely a woman, but a force of nature – dark-eyed enchantress, all beguiling mystery, confidence, and grace.

For a suspended moment, I simply looked at her.

Truly looked.

At the flush blooming across her skin. At the curve of her smile. At the wild disarray of dark curls crushed against the rumpled linens. 

Her hands rested upon my hips, warm and possessive, guiding rather than commanding. I remember the sound she made when I lowered myself over her, our lips meeting – a gasping, wholly ravishing sound that unfurled through me like a blessing and ignited something primordial within me. 

The chamber seemed to pulse around us.

Candles flickered.

Incense smoldered.

Our shadows merged and separated upon the walls as though participating in some sibylline rite known only to women.

Those moments pleasure eclipsed pain.

Moments when I forgot to mourn.

Moments when I forgot everything but her.

Our bodies moved together in a wordless hymn – sorrow and longing, devotion and passion woven so tightly together that they could no longer be separated. Her breath mingled with mine. Our sighs and moans rose together beneath the watchful stars suspended overhead until I could no longer tell where one of us ended and the other began. 

For those lambent intervals, I ceased to be heartbroken.

I ceased to be the destroyer of my own happiness.

I was simply a woman in the arms of another woman, worshipping and being worshipped in return. 

Perhaps… perhaps… My faith in love had not died.

My faith in tenderness had not died.

My faith in the sacred power of womanhood itself had not died.

It had merely been waiting for altar-light, compassion, and the touch of another woman to remember itself.

There were no more tears. The well had finally run dry, leaving me drained almost beyond recognition, a husk of my former self.

I have only the vaguest recollection of a steaming bath. I remember being lowered into fragrant waters, encircled by a ring of living flame, the flickering firelight transforming the chamber into something primeval and womb-like. Priestess. Pilgrim. Penitent. I could not have said which one I was.

My head throbbed in mournful protest, each heartbeat reverberating behind my eyes. I cupped my face in my palms. A solitary tear slipped free, tracing its familiar course through the ruins. 

My body had grown heavy with exhaustion, every muscle languid and unresponsive. Malaise, desire, release, and revelation had left me utterly spent. I felt hollowed and remade all at once, as though some antediluvian part of me had been gently excavated, cleansed, and returned to my keeping.

I drifted in that liminal space between waking and dreams, buoyed by warmth, candle-smoke, and the exploratory imprint of her hands upon my skin.

Through the opaline haze, I slowly became aware of my surroundings. A pillow rested beneath my head. Blankets had been drawn lovingly over us. And still, she would not banish me, her form curved protectively around mine, warm skin pressed against skin, her steady breathing a soothing rhythm against my back.

The barely functioning, rational side of me stirred briefly and wondered why.

Why had she remained?

Why had she gathered my shattered pieces like bits of stained glass and held them so carefully, making space for me? This had not been her battle. Not her storm. She had nothing tangible to gain by descending into that darkness beside me, by bearing watch to my rage, my despair, my unraveling.

And yet, she had.

The pain had not disappeared. It still pulsed within me, burrowing and aching, a spined creature scratching at the edges, desperate to sink its claws once more into my marrow. But now it lingered only at the boundaries of my consciousness, banished to the furthest reaches by her presence, by candlelight, by whispered invocations and elder magic potent enough to hold sorrow at bay for a few precious hours. 

Curled safely within the sanctuary of her arms, I mused upon the many forms of love. I wished I possessed a name for this one – for a love that did not seek to fix or rescue, did not judge or possess, but willingly descended into the inky depths of another’s darkness, carrying nothing but tenderness, and held fast until dawn.

Somewhere between firelight and sleep, held fast by woman who had asked for nothing and given everything, I surrendered at last to rest.

Curled safely within her embrace, I surrendered to the merciful oblivion of sleep.

Until next time, XO. Elsie