THE OLD HAG HEX
Do I Need an Exorcism or Is My Boyfriend Just Draining My Life Force?
The Unreliable Narrator Entry #3
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It was just past midnight when the pain became unbearable. I had felt lethargic for weeks, and a dull, aching pain was radiating from an unknown location within my body, expanding outward to meet every cell within me. Suddenly, a sharp, shooting pain at my temples began to replace the dull ache within. I felt disoriented and distressed as I struggled to pull myself from bed. I crawled down the stairs like a feral animal to ask my boyfriend—who, for the sake of this story, we will call Justin—to take me to the ER.
The rhythmic beat in my chest peaked and skipped like a rogue tennis ball, bouncing wildly around an open court. My hands and feet felt clammy, and there was a swell of heat building behind my eyes as I willed myself not to cry. The lump in my throat felt like a boulder being pushed uphill as I tried to find the words to tell him that I needed to go to the ER.
To his credit, he quickly sprung into action as he watched me struggling to stand, pulling myself up from the floor at the edge of his desk. He ran to the door of our guest room, flinging it open to wake up his assistant, who was living with us at the time. For the sake of this story, we will call him Dan.
Justin threw him the keys to the car, shouting, “Allie's not okay, we gotta go.” Scooping me up into his arms, I felt relieved that he wasn't mad at me and comforted by the fact that he seemed to know exactly what to do in times of crisis. I had laid in our room for hours in excruciating pain, not wanting to say a word because I assumed he would tell me that I was just being dramatic—because he knew I came from a family of hypochondriacs.
As a teenager, I began to worry that my family would one day be blacklisted by 911. It felt like a constant stream of ambulances arrived at our door anytime my mom or stepdad suspected an ailment or detected the slightest shift in their heartbeat or blood pressure.
As he lifted my limp body into the back of the car, I closed my eyes and tears began to trickle down my cheeks. I felt like a little girl who wanted to cry out for her mommy. The cold leather of the back seat soothed my throbbing temples as I lay in the fetal position, waiting for the harsh fluorescent lights of a hospital parking lot to hit my face.
Instead, I felt the accelerated hum of the engine as we made a sharp turn onto the freeway. I was confused because the nearest ER was just a few minutes down the street from us. Opening my eyes, I was met with the tired face of Dan looking back at me from the passenger seat.
“Don't worry, Shorty. We got you!” he said, as if reading my mind.
“Where are we going?” I asked. A small, nervous laugh escaped with my question, realizing that these two men—despite Dan being a father himself—lacked both any sense of self-awareness or a nurturing touch.
It wasn’t uncommon for Justin to claim he was an expert in a field he had no experience in. In the false reality he had created around him, he could perform brain surgery and land a plane that had lost both engines. Part of me still believes that with each fabrication of impossible truths, he did not believe that he was lying. Instead, he truly did live with the parted wisdom of George Costanza: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
Image from my short film A Choir Of Dreams Directed by Allie Evans
As we turned off the freeway onto the wide, sprawling streets of old Glendale, I had come to terms with the fact that we were not seeking the help of a healthcare professional. Instead, I had no choice but to blindly follow as Justin told me he “knew who could fix this.”
It was nearing 1 a.m. when we pulled up to the driveway of our friend’s early 1900s home. For the sake of this story, we will call him Lance. There was a single porch light on, that backlit his pacing silhouette. The night air was still warm from the baking concrete heat of a summer day, and it was so quiet you could hear the distant noise of frogs and crickets.
The door by my head opened and Dan pulled me from the car. Lance rushed to my side and ushered us into the house, directing everyone upstairs through hushed whispers, as the rest of the house slept. The steep wooden stairs creaked as they carried me up. I felt like a gunshot victim in an old Western film, being treated for a life-threatening wound inside an old saloon.
I couldn’t help but think of the long line of women who have been ushered into unsuspecting homes in the darkness of night to receive the type of medical care that should be a universal birthright, but instead is villainized and forced to be taken care of in shamed secrecy because the pain, and value of women’s autonomy is so deeply undervalued.
The three of them laid me down onto a bed in a dimly lit room, and Lance looked over at Justin, asking what was wrong. The irony was that no one had yet asked me what was wrong. I was clearly unwell—my face was grey, and I was in full-body sweats. My heartbeat was irregular, and I was in intense emotional distress from the pain that was pulsing through my body. Justin gave a vague list of symptoms, and then Lance began to scan my body with his hands.
As a lover of all things woo-woo, this was not a foreign practice to me. I myself had been trained in the Japanese practice of Reiki earlier that year. The ancient art of Reiki is a healing practice in which the practitioner is trained to energetically scan the subject’s body for physical and emotional ailments or blockages. Then, acting as a vessel for the healing energy of a higher power, the practitioner places their hands lightly on or above a person, with the aim of directing energy to support the body's natural healing abilities. It's based on the belief that imbalances or blockages in the body's energy field can lead to illness, and restoring this balance can promote healing.
Lance’s hands hovered above my body as he whispered inaudible words to himself. Suddenly, he stopped and announced he knew what was wrong. I was genuinely intrigued to see what he would say, because I myself had not a clue what was wrong. I’m normally very in tune with my body, but I had never experienced these feelings before, and I felt very strongly about wanting to get out of this house and to a doctor as quickly as possible.
“It’s Justin!” he said.
Blood rushed to my face and my limp body became as stiff as a board. I had been experiencing mysterious, ongoing health problems for quite some time. Every time a doctor asked me to pinpoint any notable changes or traumatic events that may have occurred around the time my health started to rapidly decline, I faked naïveté, claiming I couldn’t think of anything. The truth was, I had always been a happy and healthy young woman—until I started dating Justin.
Almost immediately, my body began trying to warn me that something was not right, but for whatever reason, I was in love with this man and refused to listen to the very clear warning signs and distress signals my body was putting out. Just because I ignored them didn’t mean they went unnoticed. A nagging and paranoid voice began to loop in my mind as doctor after doctor struggled to find the cause of my chronic pain and mysterious autoimmune-like symptoms:
“This man is going to kill you—if not by his own hands, then by the unbearable stress your body is being put under.”
I was betraying myself, so my body began to betray me.
Image from my short film A Choir Of Dreams Directed by Allie Evans
The room was silent and I was in shock. Had he really just verbalized the paranoid words that constantly played in my guilt-ridden mind? Justin was the problem.... It was so obvious, but I dared not say it out loud. My confidence and emotional psyche were so depleted that I would beat my inner knowing into submission, convincing myself that I was actually the problem—that I was crazy.
Lance instructed him to lay down on the bed next to me, and I waited with bated breath for him to put Justin in his place. In retrospect, I realize that many of the people within our inner circle—though not romantically involved with Justin—were still in abusive relationships with him.
We were all aware of the elephant in the room but never allowed ourselves to acknowledge it. Instead, we all doubled down on supporting his bad behavior in hopes of receiving his validation and praise. I have come to feel deep sympathy for survivors of cults, because in a sense, we were all in one that no one else knew about. It’s fascinating what your mind can justify—and even believe—when you have been conditioned and brainwashed to not think clearly or in your own best interest.
Of course the scolding never came. Instead, the weight of the bed shifted and Justin laid down next to me, holding my hand. The room’s concern suddenly shifted from me to him, when out of nowhere he started to claim that he too had been feeling sick and run down.
“Perhaps out of empathy for Allie? I think I’ve been subconsciously trying to take some of her pain away.” he claimed
If I had the energy, I would have rolled my eyes, but instead I squeezed his hand and continued laying there with my eyes closed. Lance began burning sage and palo santo, wafting the room with feathers and smoke. He disappeared downstairs, and I could hear him rummaging around in the kitchen as I rolled onto my side, watching Dan eat a Reese’s cup, sitting in the corner of the room simply observing all the chaos. I can only assume he was thinking, “These crazy fucking white people.”
Lance reemerged from the darkness of the hallway with cups of water and two fresh eggs. He had both of us sit up on the edge of the bed and crack our eggs into the swirling water of the cups. My egg was engulfed in the spiral, staying perfectly intact. Justin’s egg sprouted hundreds of strings of egg whites that spiraled outwards from the yolk.
“Exactly what I thought!” Lance shouted.
What he thought was still unknown to everyone else in the room. Despite us asking several times, Lance worked as if he was in a trance, running around the room, burning things and mixing random ingredients in bowls, ignoring all lines of follow-up questions.
Whether any of what took place was rooted in an ounce of reality was not important, but I was at least starting to feel a tiny bit better purely through the distraction of his Oscar-worthy performance. Lance took his shoes off and was standing over both of us, straddling the edges of the bed when he began screaming and shouting at an old woman.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but he did all of this with so much conviction I started to believe that he could see something I could not. He was screaming things like, “Get away from him, you old hag! You are not welcome here, bitch!”
Placing his hands lightly below my collarbone, I felt a large rush of energy push up and out of my chest. Even as I write this today, it feels both crazy and slightly annoying to admit that it felt like a brick had been lifted off my chest at that moment. He jumped from the bed, slamming his hands into a mirror as if trapping something inside of it. He threw the mirror into his closet and went in after it, slamming the door behind him. There was loud thumping and grunting from the closet, and at a certain point, I remember hearing the mirror shatter.
He came out of the closet looking pale and disturbed. With bloodied knuckles, his hands held a sealed glass jar.
“It’s done,” he declared.
Placing the glass jar down on a desk, he began to explain that “someone had put an old hag hex on Justin, and it was possessing him and strangling me to death through him.” And that’s why I was feeling so horrible.
Of course, the men in the room instantly knew who the hex had come from—the only possible option: Justin’s ex-girlfriend. It’s funny how every childlike man just happens to date “the worst and most crazy” women. Only the perspective of time, can leave women who are swindled into believing the false narratives about the previous partner, with the painful truth that perhaps your man is the worst—and he drove this poor girl to the brink of madness.
Did I feel cured of the “Old Hag Hex”? Perhaps temporarily, because of how deeply I was distracted from my own reality. Regardless, an energetic recognition had taken place, and for the rest of the night the paranoid voice in my mind telling me that my boyfriend was draining my life force didn’t feel quite so paranoid. Instead, it felt like an energetic truth that others could subconsciously sense—even if this truth needed to be disguised through the veil of a mysterious hex.
Lance handed me some rue and instructed me to bathe in hot water with it when I got home. He handed Justin the glass jar and said that we needed to take the old hag up into the mountainside and dispose of it so that she wouldn’t come back to hurt him or follow us home.
We all shuffled down the stairs as quietly as possible despite knowing the whole house must have been awoken by the chaos that had just ensued. We piled into the car, and I watched Lance wave in the rearview mirror as we drove off. Justin pulled the car over two blocks away and rolled the jar into the gutter of the street. Dan and I both looked at each other, superstitiously spooked. Even if what took place that night had simply been theatrics, we didn’t want to take any chances, and we both panicked over Justin’s inability to follow directions.
When I got home, I bathed in the rue and took a cold shower. The next morning, the pain returned—but my guilt for secretly believing that my relationship was making me sick did not.
Image from my short film A Choir Of Dreams Directed by Allie Evans
I wish I could tell you that my unplanned exorcism led to mental clarity and that I packed up my car and left the next day. Unfortunately, I did not. His teeth had sunk so deep into me that I believed pulling them from the wound would be my demise. The only thing capable of soothing my pain was the very thing that was causing it.
When it did finally come to an end, my wasted youth was seemingly returned to sender. Hand to heart, I began to age backwards, and almost everyone in my life commented on it. My hair grew thick and long at record speed, all of my acne cleared within weeks, and my skin was bright and plump. The drop in cortisol levels left me with an entirely new chiseled face shape, and my childlike joy came back to a soul that I assumed would remain hollow for the rest of my life.
Cutting off the supply of my life force seemingly broke the spell and illusion of who Justin was—for nearly everyone in our lives. I never said a single bad word about him; everyone came to their own conclusion of what reality was, despite his attempted assassination of my reputation. It was as if the false roadside magic trick he was selling had been revealed, and what was seen could not be unseen.
Today I sleep soundly knowing that I will never seek revenge on Justin, because he has it bad enough already. The Old Hag Hex must have followed him home that night. He is now a middle-aged man who hangs out with teenagers. His hairline has receded in a way that only the conclave could understand, and in the words of my friend Michele: he looks like he’s melting.
Of course, no one should wish ill upon their exes—and I’m happy to confidently keep my side of the street clean, knowing that the only thing I will ever wish for him is receiving exactly what he deserves.