She had made tea for him, she said.
Scavenged the berries and leaves, poured in great helpings of things like tenderness and excitement and hope. He had tasted them, politely, but ultimately found them too much for him. He bought his own tea in boxes from the store; black with sugar, mild and polite and unassuming.
It wasn’t about the tea, the witch reassured me. It was just that her way of doing things was not quite right. She hadn’t realised, had kept making the tea and finding it left on the counter, cold, always assuming the best of him, assuming he had just forgotten.
If she had listened more, she realised, she would have understood that she was not right for him, nor him for her.
If the strangeness was all a little more than he could handle, that didn’t mean she should dim her light just for him, I told her. Burn as brightly as you like.
- Excerpt, “Conversations With the Witch Next Door”
