18 Keep Your Head Up

Lost touch with my soul
I had nowhere to turn
I had nowhere to go
Lost sight of my dream,

Thought it would be the end of me
I thought I’d never make it through
I had no hope to hold on to,
I thought I would break

I didn’t know my own strength
And I crashed down, and I tumbled
But I did not crumble
I got through all the pain

I didn’t know my own strength
Survived my darkest hour
My faith kept me alive
I picked myself back up

Hold my head up high
I was not built to break
I didn’t know my own strength

Found hope in my heart,
I found the light to life
My way out the dark
Found all that I need
Here inside of me

I thought I’d never find my way
I thought I’d never lift that weight
I thought I would break

I didn’t know my own strength
And I crashed down, and I tumbled
But I did not crumble
I got through all the pain

I didn’t know my own strength
Survived my darkest hour
My faith kept me alive
I picked myself back up

Hold my head up high
I was not built to break
I didn’t know my own strength

There were so many times I
Wondered how I’d get through the night I
Thought took all I could take

I didn’t know my own strength
And I crashed down, and I tumbled
But I did not crumble
I got through all the pain

I didn’t know my own strength
Survived my darkest hour
My faith kept me alive
I picked myself back up

Hold my head up high
I was not built to break
I didn’t know my own strength

I was not built to break
I got to know my own strength

Maya Fey
Kurain Village
January 24, 2020, 12:00 PM

Ancient sacred traditions. Damn them all. Damn them all to hell.

There was nothing halfway about it. Being the Master of the Kurain Channeling technique sucked, plain and simple. It really and truly did.

There were fewer politics, conspiracies, and smear campaigns involved in Presidential election campaigns than there were within the semi-crumbling walls and ruins that were Kurain Village!

Maya’s newfound position was as set in stone as if she’d inherited the blue-blood monarch title of a nation.

It had been determined as her irrefutable birthright and there was no say, yay or nay, in the matter.

This was an unspoken reminder that she was often tempted to voice out loud to some of the remaining Morgan supporters on the Elder Council, who deemed that succession should be based on ability, not what part of the family tree you were on, and that little Pearl, whom Maya had stated as her second-in-command, was more worthy of the title than she.

The old biddies would have fainted from the shocking irony, had they known that while Maya didn’t agree with her aunt’s insane attempted methods at securing her cousin the esteemed Master position, if she had been able to step down and give the ten-year-old the task of running the damn village and all the headache-inducing bullshit that went with, she bloody well would have!

Nearly a year into the role, Maya still hadn’t quite ascertained how there could be so much controversy over a position that was undisputedly inherited, much like a royal title. Hence, it was a topic that should have required neither debate nor discussion, much like the decisions she made as Master.

Yet that was exactly what she’d been facing regularly since day one with the disapproving Council of Elders, who had been running the matriarchal society since her mother had left.

On numerous occasions, and with complete exasperation veering on hysteria, Maya had pondered the lunacy of how it was that she had to fight for the right to make decisions and maintain being in a position that she’d never even wanted.

The village had been without its master for 17 years and while outwardly appearing to function well, was breaking at the seams. Nobody had made a budget since Misty Fey vanished, though many members of the clan still saw fit to spend the family’s vast pile of money regardless. Many of the buildings started to crumble without proper maintenance, leading to collapses and injuries.

All of these things would have to be dealt with, and quickly.

Some of the branch family members took some control into their hands during the long break but were unable to legitimize their power. They had no respect for the new village leader’s authority. They glared with spite and resentment at her as she claimed her unwanted position, and she, in turn, ignored them as usual and mentally flipped them the finger as she did so.

She still had more plans for enhancing the place and didn’t give a damn if the disapproving old hags didn’t like it.

Changing careers is something that takes you forward into unexplored territory, but you need not get scared. Maybe it’s exactly where your success is hidden. Explore it well and you will find.

For instance, the new Kurain head saw no correlation between how a customary enforced vegetarian diet enhanced spiritual prowess in the least. So, to the council’s undisguised horror, she had announced at the last meeting, her plans to remedy the fact that there was a distinct lack of burgers in the chef’s repertoire!

Why the hell not? It wasn’t as if they couldn’t afford to make changes and customize the menus to suit specific palettes – mainly, her own!

Maya now had more money than she could ever possibly spend. With those resources at her disposal, she’d finally been able to pull some aspects of Kurain Village and drag it (albeit kicking and screaming!), into the 21st century. Much to the disgruntlement of the village elders, she had brought into fruition her long-ago plans to have not only a cell tower but a satellite receiver as well.

Hello, cell phone and internet service! 

After all, she’d reasoned, what was the point of having a surplus of dispensable income, the same one that had allowed her to fulfill her promise and pre-pay her boyfriend’s rent (also, his bills – plagued further by the guilt over all the money he’d spent feeding and lodging her and Pearly for all those years, she’d also taken to sending him some anonymous cash donations from the fees of her channeling sessions) for the next year or so, if there was no feasible way to be in touch with him while they were apart? While the concept of love letters via snail mail was a romantic notion, no amount of money was going to change the fact that the mail was only collected and delivered weekly to the remote village. The diviner’s naturally impatient nature wouldn’t allow for it.

Ergo, while she had more wealth than she ever could have imagined in her wildest dreams, Maya would have been the first to subscribe to the adage “money can’t buy happiness.”

It was all too painfully true. Despite the steady comforting presence of her beloved little cousin, the Master had never felt more miserable, or alone, in her entire life.

With Misty Fey’s shocking, harrowing death, Maya had been thrust immediately into the role and responsibilities associated with taking over as Kurain Master. Despite having had the impending knowledge of her destiny all her life, Maya always deemed it something which was going to happen years in the future, not right away! Now, after barely having the time to mourn her mother’s unexpected passing, having the weighty responsibility thrust upon her was tremendously overwhelming, with all kinds of intense preparations, reordering, and rearranging of her life. It was a daunting task, but initially, she had motivated herself partially with the consolation that soon she would get her life efficiently sorted, so she could also continue as Phoenix’s legal assistant when all was said and done.

But then her boyfriend’s life had unwittingly gone to hell in a handbasket, so that option, along with the likelihood of it ever coming to pass in the imminent future, was gone with the wind!

She often hated herself for setting back the women’s movement and admitting that so much of her life’s goals had mostly revolved around a man. It was downright pathetic really, her lack of ambition. She was filled with self-disgust that her hopes and dreams had never centered around the career which was supposed to be her birthright, but had always revolved around Phoenix, initially as his subordinate as General Manager of the Law Office. Then, after they’d gotten together, her aspirations had never ventured further than remaining by his side, but maybe later down the line as his partner, in law and life, perhaps obtaining her degree and becoming a paralegal.

Understandably the former was a goal beyond foreseeable reach at the moment, but would the latter ever come to fruition, or was that too, just a pitiful pipe dream on her behalf?

It had been eight and a half months since she’d seen Phoenix. Since that agonizing fateful day in his office, when he’d told her that he loved her, but he didn’t know how they could be together, due to the potential issues it could cause with Trucy’s adoption, should Maya turn up as a character assassinating skeleton in his closet.

He had rejected her repeated consequent offers to come and live with her at Kurain, insisting he couldn’t subsist in a parasitic lifestyle sponging off her – that it was bad enough he had to rely on her to pay his rent. Besides, there was no way he could justifiably expect her to support his daughter, for whom he was still being forced to undergo the arduous turmoil that encompassed formal adoption. He implored her to concentrate on her own life and position as Kurain Master and not worry about him. Even though Phoenix knew how she felt about him, Maya was unable to properly convey the words to him to make him comprehend that despite everything, she loved him; he was eternally established as a fundamental and irreducible part of her life in her psyche and that was why she’d said she’d wait for him. At the time, he had agreed he wanted her to because he loved her back.

And so the long-distance relationship betwixt them had begun.

Being Phoenix’s cloak-and-dagger far-away girlfriend consisted of phone calls, the occasional Skype chats (she’d painstakingly had to explain how it worked and had even mailed him a webcam and instructed him to set it up … and he’d still needed to have Larry Butz come and complete the installation!) and emails galore.

All of these had, of course, been conducted after Trucy had gone to bed. While the calls and chats and emails helped ease some of the pain of separation, it wasn’t the same as actually seeing her lover. Or holding him in her arms and kissing him. Touching him. Making love with him.

Maya hated being out of sight – she strived to ensure that it didn’t also mean out of mind. She did everything she could to keep the newfound distance between them as fun and as interesting as possible. On top of racy late-night conversations and random, saucy texts exchanged between them about what exactly they would do to one another if the other were there, she would frequently email amusing online photos, videos, and a few jokes to hopefully lighten his mood.

She missed her boyfriend so much that it hurt. Aside from always having been her knight in shining armor, he’d also always given her a reason to smile – and that had been even before they’d gotten together. Now on top of the pain of missing her best friend, the necromancer’s heart and body ached for her boyfriend. Especially since, as of the last few months, their phone calls had been getting shorter in length and fewer and further in between. It wasn’t the fault of either of them. She had her travels and conferences as part of her new role, and Phoenix worked till late in the night most of the week. Maya did her best to stay up for him when he called, but some nights, it was after 3:00 am and she had meetings early the next day and would pass out before she could hear the much-needed “sweet dreams, I love you,” that she so desperately longed for to achieve a peaceful slumber.

Despite their efforts to work around it, lately, it seemed as though their opposite schedules didn’t seem to ever allow them to “reach out and touch each other” whenever intended. Whenever she tried to call him, he more often than not was asleep and had missed her call, or simply wasn’t there, and vice versa.

On the occasions they did manage to connect, it seemed that the best way for coping with the difficulty of their situation was to keep their communications to uncontroversial topics and maintain something of emotional isolation between them. Maya didn’t want to seem to be intruding or mistrusting of him, or worse, pathetically needy. She stifled the urge to beg him to constantly reassure her that all this agonizing wasn’t for naught. That the end justified the means and that she wasn’t a fool to be waiting in vain for him; that ultimately, they would be together again, a real family, and parents for Pearl and Trucy.

Losing his attorney’s badge was something Maya knew would bother him until he got it back. She knew Phoenix would investigate who set him up and fight to get it back eventually; for all she knew, he had already commenced the process of finding out who framed him. But he had also made it clear that lately settling into life with Trucy was his primary objective.

He didn’t want to talk about the disbarring or his situation – it had been almost a year now since it had occurred – and she didn’t want to upset him by reminding him of it, and she didn’t want to bore him with talk of the tediously demanding details of her training and the mentally draining politics involved with her position. It limited topics of conversation greatly to much else than fluff chatter and phone sex.

The spirit medium knew Phoenix had been somewhat emotionally maladjusted since the disbarring, but he did not show warnings of becoming dysfunctional and was proving to be a competent and dedicated parent. Her boyfriend was born to be a dad and despite his initial misgivings, he was a natural with kids, especially little girls. They adored him. Certainly being a single father was tough, but she was glad that he had someone there for him to give him a purpose in life right now; to fill the void in his life that at the moment, she could not.

He certainly appeared to be enamored with his new daughter, who his life appeared to revolve around now. The topic of his daughter seemed to be the only thing that seemed to snap Phoenix out of his resigned, dead-man-walking state of being. He proudly boasted about the little girl’s perceptiveness and self-reliance; how she helped with chores and made dinner for them and appeared to be more of a mini adult than a child. Maya was thoroughly impressed by all of this, as well as relieved that the little girl appeared more of an asset than a burden in Phoenix’s life. She was most taken by how Trucy was already doing paid magic shows at The Wonder Bar and birthday parties.

So she was well aware of how much Phoenix had his hands full being a working single parent. And it was because of that devotion to fatherhood that Maya was uncertain about whether or not the favor she was about to ask would be feasible to agree to, or if it was even prudent to ask.

Japanese customs had dictated since the late 19th century to no longer adhere to the Chinese New Year timeline and marked January 1st, as celebrated in the Western Hemisphere, as the onset date they used per annum. However, Maya had capitalized on and manipulated the fact that since Kurain was so steeped in the ancient cultural traditions and values for everything else, they should honor the previously historical Eastern date to mark the beginning of the New Year.

Maya had come up with every excuse in the book to delay the inevitability of the Master’s inauguration ceremony. She had cited how it was in poor taste, bad luck and not to mention disrespectful to Misty Fey’s memory to have a celebratory ritual of any kind in the same year her mother had been killed. Therefore, there was no way she would allow anything of the sort to happen, in any formal ceremonial capacity, even though she’d taken over the Master title last winter. And then she’d stubbornly maintained that stance when the premier date of January had come and gone.

Which brought her to the current date. No amount of delay tactics could change or prevent the fact that tomorrow marked the beginning of the Chinese New Year. And that was the inarguable date when they would have the official initiation ceremony, swearing her in as the sanctioned Kurain Master.

The Master was officially out of ploys, despite her ridiculous, almost childish hopes that since until now, as she had not officially initiated, there was still time to vote that she be given official sanctions as having “abdicated” and voted unfit to be Master by the wretched Elders, who on occasion had claimed they would do just that! Maya now realized, as she should have then, that these had been empty threats and such a ruling would never pass with the required majority.

The time had come. She was going to become the undisputed Master of Kurain as of tomorrow whether she liked it or not.

The psychic sat there in her bedroom at Fey Manor, staring at the telephone, trying to summon the nerve to make the phone call she yearned to make. She’d been dragging her heels long enough.

Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained right?

With a great feeling of trepidation, Maya took a deep breath to steady her nerves. Her palms were sweating and made her grip slippery as she picked up the receiver and dialed the number, all the while unable to squelch the despaired agony of rejection she was bracing herself for if the outcome didn’t amass in the way she fervently hoped and prayed it would.

Whitney Houston – I Didn’t Know My Own Strength