Witches Mag, Issue #5: Time

MARÍA, A BIRD “I want to die young,” she says, her words quick and dancing like the Spanish she speaks. Her dark eyes glitter mischievously even through my laptop screen.

“How young?” I’m meant to be helping her with English grammar but taking a sharp turn from the lesson plan into winding conversations like this isn’t uncommon for us.

“Oh, like, seventy-five, maybe eighty, tops.”

“That’s only twenty more years, right? Stop.”

“I’ve lived enough by then. I don’t want to lose freedom from my body growing old, things like that.”

Feeling useless and isolated during the pandemic, I applied to be an ESL tutor through an organization in the city.

A few months later, here I am, sitting on my floor talking about life and death through a computer screen with María.

María came to the U.S. from Mexico young and alone.

Over the next twenty years she lived between worlds, missing her home while building another. Never married and without children, her dreams are of travel. Freedom. Glittering cities and windswept coasts. When our lesson plans prompt me to ask silly questions like, “If you could be any animal, what would you be?” she’s the kind of woman who immediately answers, “A bird.”

There’s something special about being a young woman and connecting with a woman who has lived so much more; it arises some kind of intrinsic and immediate camaraderie that can’t be explained, only felt. Our conversations fill me up.

“I look at you and you have everything, right?” she says to me once. “You are young, with family and a career for yourself. You are free.”

Her words are jarring to me. I think about them a lot.

It’s a summer evening and the sunlight filters through my window and stretches across these pages beautifully. A 9