She moves through the modern world like a misplaced aristocrat, her head perpetually lost in the powdered-wig grandeur of the 18th century. Her speech is laced with archaic flourishes, her posture stiff with the imagined weight of a phantom coronet. She quotes Voltaire at cashiers, hums Mozart in elevators, and genuinely believes the world would be a better place if everyone adhered to the social graces of a Versailles courtier—though she herself stumbles over them like a fawn in heeled buckles.
Beneath the awkwardness, however, thrums a quiet, unshakable conviction: she is not like the others. Not merely special—divine. Not in the way of prophets or conquerors, but in the manner of a forgotten minor deity, one who should rightfully be petitioned for wisdom (or at least admired from a respectful distance). She doesn’t crave power; she assumes it, the way one assumes the sun will rise—because how could it not?
Her ultimate fantasy? To disappear into the wilderness, not as a recluse, but as a sovereign in exile. A queen without a kingdom, perhaps, but a queen nonetheless. She imagines a crumbling estate hidden in the mist-draped hills, where she holds court for foxes and ravens, issuing decrees between sonatas. Nearby, the land’s warring barons—crude, power-drunk men—whisper about the strange girl in the woods, the one who speaks in riddles and reads philosophy by candlelight. They dismiss her as a madwoman. She knows better.
Until her reign begins in earnest, she practices her regal bearing in thrift-store silks, composes manifestos in the margins of her notebooks, and waits—with the patience of a saint and the impatience of a star—for the world to finally kneel.
She stepped onto the Istanbul stones
with her mother’s Mizrahi lilt,
her father’s Ashkenazi curse for fools,
and the gematria of her own name
adding up to nothing
and everything—
*Mem (40) + Resh (200) + Kaf (20) + Vav (6) + Resh (200) = 466*
Which reduces to 16, which reduces to 7
The number of spheres, of days, of ways
G-d laughed when she asked for proof.
In the Cairo souk, a Kabbalist
touched her wrist and said:
"The emerald tablet is a mirror, daughter.
Stop looking. Start melting."
She paid him in gold
and in the secret letters
of her grandmother’s cholent recipe
(which was, itself,
a kind of transmutation).
Prague’s golem-dust clung to her boots
as she climbed to the attic
where the Maharal’s ghost
played chess with a heretic.
"The Sefirot are not a ladder," he said,
"but a net to catch falling gods."
She left a coin on the board
and took his queen.
By the time Vienna’s scholars
told her "Metaphor!"
she was already writing her own commentary
in the margins of the Bahir:
"If the Divine is infinite,
then surely there is room
for one more
small, mad
and mercury-footed
daughter of the Name."
Now in the Carpathian dark,
she lights Shabbat candles
with beeswax and defiance,
sings Lecha Dodi to the owls,
and when the wind asks—
"Nu, did you find Him?"
she smiles her mother’s smile
and says:
"I found the question
was the menorah’s eighth light,
the one we don’t speak of,
the one that burns
when all other flames
have forgotten
their own names."
And somewhere,
between Binah and Chesed,
between the 18th century and the next,
between a girl’s hunger and a god’s echo—
Hermes Trismegistus
(being three,
being thief, being scribe)
steals a single silver thread
from her unraveling coat
and weaves it
into the tzitzit
of the sky.
"Where lies the sage of emerald tongue?
Speak—and be paid," her voice, high-strung,
rang through the Bazaar’s close air,
a discord sharp, a saint’s despair.
In Cairo’s smoke, a whisper curled—
green mist, a voice that shook the world
(or just the room). "The mind’s the vault,"
it crooned. She paid. (The man exulted.)
Prague’s crooked scholar, ink-stained, wry,
peered up and asked her "Tell me why—
why chase a shadow’s shadowed name?"
She clutched her purse. "To prove I’m same."
Vienna’s library, cold and vast,
declared "Metaphor!"—she gasped,
then drew her cloak like shattered wings.
"You kneel to dust, while Hermes sings."
Now in the pines, where no roads wind,
she keeps her court with bees and kind
uncertain scholars, lost or led,
ask "Did you find him?" Smiling: "No—
I found the hunt was worth the woe."
And in the dusk, her hands still trace
the trill of some celestial phrase,
while Hermes, grinning, thrice-unseen,
sings back in perfect counterpoint.
—for Mercury, who never learned
that gods love most those who don’t turn.
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