She had it all - riches, a college scholarship, a girlfriend - until her conservative, hyper-religious parents found out about the girlfriend and made her choose between conversion therapy and disownment. That was the end of her academic career.
Thr...
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That was how I discovered magick. I discovered something else, arguably another form of magick, a couple of months later, shortly before the beginning of winter break; although at the time I had no idea how to contextualize it. Silly me.
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It's dark, so I flick on the lights.
The padded walls and floor of the wrestling room have an acrid under-smell of perspiration, the result of years of bodies writhing, straining, and sweating in a struggle for victory - mastery of techniques, dominance over opponents. No matter how well or how often the room gets scrubbed and sterilized, it will always smell faintly of sweat.
Above us, I can hear shouts, thumping noises, and the occasional muffled whistle tweet - the wrestling room is beneath a basketball court, and there is apparently a game going on. Probably just intramural, or we'd have heard more about it. Or maybe it's a class. I've never really paid much attention to the sports schedule.
"Oh, good," he says, "we have the place to ourselves for a while."
My sparring partner is built along my lines: tall and gawky. He's even taller than I am, which is saying a lot. Most people stop growing before they are old enough to enter college, but not I. I gained two inches in my freshman year alone and going by the way my clothing fits (or, more accurately, doesn't fit) I'm still gaining. I'm taller than most men; I tower over other women. But he's taller.
He's also thin, although it's more of a lean and wiry kind of thin than a "feed me, I'm starving" kind of thin. When we fight together, we probably look like storks trying to do interpretive dance.
The only thing the wrestling room needs to be perfect would be unbreakable mirrors along one or two of the walls. It would be much easier to practice kata if I could see my body's reflection and correct any errors before they get entrenched. Maybe one of these days someone will invent a padded, shatterproof, non-warping mirror specifically for use in martial arts training.
