The beads of the Unakite bracelet that I had purchased a week earlier were wearing down, revealing underneath what seemed to be clear plastic. What once posed as small, polished stones or “Crystals,” now looked like nothing more than painted, plastic balls.
The bracelet was one of the less pretty, less “crystal‑y” ones that I wore in bunches, dangling from my skinny wrists, not sparkly or shimmery, but dull and earthy.
For this reason, it is unlikely that I would have chosen it myself. The tiny, blonde, fairy-girl at the Crystal Store had a way of sizing me up, and telling me exactly what I needed based on her reading of my energy. “Unakite! For sure.” She said as she slid the beads onto my arm, where it met all the other beads with a satisfying, clicking sound. To be fair, I had asked her, “What do I need?” searching, desperate for anyone to tell me what I might do to feel better.
Now, as I looked at the fake bracelet, I felt rage boiling up within me. I couldn’t remember what the crystal’s actual healing properties were, or what feelings they were meant to elicit, but a fake anything always throws me into a fury. I cannot stand a fake. I knew it.
It was all fake. Everything I’d ever trusted in was fake. A lie, all of it. There was no magic. Magic was not real, and this bracelet was proof that every extraordinary belief I’d ever had was farce. I thought about letting it go, and just living with the sad fact that I had debunked the whole crystal world of spiritual healing. I decided instead, to take them down with me, and confront those crystal-frauds, head-on.
I had become obsessed with visiting the sparkling and mystical Crystal Store shortly after its opening in East Nashville. I first heard about it from a photographer friend of mine, who was shooting a no-budget video for me, Guerilla-style, for a song of mine called Crystal. The song was about having a new found clarity after getting sober. Crystal clear, clarity. Connie, my photographer friend, was to shoot the opening party for The Crystal Store, immediately after our shoot.
She invited me along, but I was too wiped out. I could handle very few calendar events per day as I was still recovering from a head injury that left me dizzy, tired and nauseous much of the time. We laughed at the fact that she was shooting two Crystal themed things that day, thinking it was quite kismet, but that’s how everything had been since I had hit my head and quit drinking. Non stop synchronicity.
In life, I hadn’t given much thought to crystals, other than using the word as a metaphor in a song. Perhaps they were on my subconscious radar as I had taken to watching nature documentaries about caves, while recovering from my concussion. Dark, quiet, and filled with surprising treasures, glittering stalactite chandeliers, bats, and creepy-crawly creatures, who’s eyes had been weeded out by evolution after centuries in the pitch black, freezing cold slime. I could relate, I felt all of those things inside of me.
A few days after the video shoot, I googled the store’s address and drove there to check it out myself. My vibration raised instantly as I walked into the Victorian house that had been transformed into an actual fairy land.
Bright, colorful gems, on every wall, and in every corner, the sun hitting their carved facets and bouncing rainbows around the room. In the center of the shop stood a giant, phallic, Rose Quartz, even taller than me. I looked up at it, put my arms around it, and leaned my face next to it’s cool, smooth surface. Touching and holding the stones was encouraged.
There were little handwritten signs next to every basket of crystals, describing all of their magical, healing properties, everything from a better libido, to better blood, to psychic powers and astral travel. I had found the answers. I had almost no money, but it wasn’t a problem, as you could purchase a small stone for only a few dollars.
Bracelets started around ten dollars. This quickly became my new habit, and my new secret as I shouldn’t have been buying anything frivolous, especially not rocks. My recent rock bottom had hit every area of my life; financial, relationships, career, dignity, sanity, it left no stone unturned.
I had been seeing a therapist on Tuesday mornings. I would unleash my despair upon him so intensely, that sometimes I worried about him. He seemed overwhelmed, under-qualified, and he was very clearly worried about me. “I feel like I’m not being seen,” I said to him as I stared at the gold toes on his sports socks, watching him dig his heels into the tan carpet. “I don’t even know if I’m real. I can’t trust anyone, or anything.” I continued, through tears.
I believe everybody wants to be seen, heard, and understood, but I had a particularly strong desire for visibility. Perhaps it had something to do with the knowing that my mother, once my beacon of love and truth, could not see me, especially since her marriage to a man who’s need for total control led him to gaslight everyone in his sight, blurring all of our realities.
I searched elsewhere and everywhere, seeking attention and validation, while I drank and drugged myself into further invisibility, shrinking smaller and smaller, until finally, I fell and hit my head, and the clarity kicked in.
After the clarity, I changed my phone number, giving the new one only to a select few. My mother was not one of them. The pain was visceral. “Please tell me what to do …” I begged the therapist. He sighed and said nothing, appearing to be drowning, right along with me.
I had never met the owner of The Crystal Store before. I had seen him around on a few of my many visits there. Long, dark hair, and glasses, covered in shimmering beads that hung from his neck and arms, he looked very much the part of “Crystal-healer-guru-guy.”
Connie was a bit of a fan-girl when it came to Ataana, saying he was a great healer, and mystic, capable of reading energy, and healing even the crystals themselves, which he referred to as “little beings.” He probably had many groupies, as the store was usually filled with all different kinds of women, all searching for relief in his soft-spoken, German accented voice, and his luminous presence.
I thought about these women, easy targets, and reminded myself that it was a good thing I wasn’t going to get sucked into such nonsense, as I introduced myself to Ataana and showed him the bracelet, explaining my theory. His smile was warm and disarming. I felt myself soften slightly, and thought I might give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it was he, who was being taken advantage of, purchasing fake wholesale gems, totally unaware that he was selling plastic in place of crystals. He looked at the bracelet with a furrowed brow and said, “I’ll be right back.”
He returned with a hammer, laid the bracelet on the ledge of the front-porch and smashed it. Several beads cracked open to reveal their interior, brownish-red and muddy-green with a little clear interwoven into the rough insides of what was very obviously a stone.
“It must have grown with a clear quartz.” He said, peering down at it. I felt incredibly foolish and was glad I didn’t accuse him of being a crook, but embarrassed that I might have implied that perhaps he was a fool.
He turned and looked at me intensely as I stood there, uncomfortable with his sudden attention. “Unconditional love.” He said. “This bracelet represents unconditional love and the real problem here, is that you don’t believe in it.”
I looked around. There was no one else in the store. It was just him and me. “Say this out loud … any entities that are attached to me, show yourself.” He said, while inspecting me. I complied, and repeated it verbatim. “Where did you feel it in your body?” He asked. I pointed to the area above my belly button, and below my ribs, right in the middle, that soft area that seems kind of empty, void of organs.
“That’s your solar plexus.” He said. “You have an entity attached to your solar plexus, since childhood, and it’s preventing you from being seen. Your mother put it there.”
I felt my whole body go tingly as I looked at him with saucer eyes.
“How could you know this?” I demanded, “I just said this in therapy. That I feel like I’m not being seen. AND, I just stopped talking to my mother!” I stared at him, waiting for a logical answer, but he just smiled that warm smile, showing no surprise. “Say it again, ANY ENTITIES THAT ARE ATTACHED TO ME, ANY DARK ENERGIES, SHOW YOURSELF!”
I repeated it, louder, and I felt a jump in that area that I now understood was referred to as my “solar plexus.” He told me to follow him and again, I complied.
We walked into one of the rooms and he pulled a large, black, stone from a basket of similar stones, and placed it in my hand. “Look into the stone. See how if you look very deeply into the stone you can see these little gold threads, underneath the darkness?” He asked me. The stone felt heavy, like a burden, as I inspected it closely. The little gold threads shimmered when you moved it slightly and it hit the light.
“You need to go deep, deep into the darkness, deeper than you’ve ever gone before, to find your golden light.” He looked into me. “You’re not afraid though because you’ve already been living in the dark, for as long as you can remember.”
I got a full body chill as I said, “Yes! I just got sober, how do you know all of this?” I was still trying to ask reasonable questions. He sat me in a chair in the corner of the room. He placed a second stone, the same type, black with gold-shimmer threads, in the palm of my empty hand. “I’m going to help you remove this entity, but whatever you do, do not let go of the stones until it’s gone.” He warned, staring into my eyes without even a hint of irony.
Sitting in the chair, it dawned on me that I felt way too vulnerable, and I longed to get up and run out, never to return. I felt hot and my heart raced and those damn rocks suddenly seemed to weigh a ton. The room shifted slightly, and everything now had heatwaves bouncing off of it, like staring at hot blacktop, on a scorching summer day. Ataana continued on, with growing intensity, “You wanted to leave this earth, you never wanted to be here, you’ve been fighting it since you were a child, and now, only recently, you’ve made a choice to remain here, to stay.”
I felt knocked back from the shock of truth, especially as I had never told ANYONE what had been going through my mind on all those mornings that I woke up, not knowing where I was, who was laying next to me, or what had happened the night before. Disappointment, that I had woken up, yet again. I had never told ANYONE what had actually happened on the night I hit my head.
How I had consumed a liter of Titos, two bottles of wine, and who knows how many lorazepam while writing a song called, “No Tomorrow.” I couldn’t remember making a conscious decision to write that song or imbibe that amount, it’s as if I was being moved by an unseen force, a mechanical arm, or an evil spirit. I could only reconstruct that evening’s events, upon waking to the horror of seeing my bloody face in the bathroom mirror, stumbling down the hall into my studio, counting the bottles, witnessing the overflowing ashtrays, and the busted piano bench, it’s legs splayed out like Bambi on ice. Then there was the matter of my face, with the piano-bench shaped cut across the bridge of my broken nose, bruises around my eyes, a split lip and a cracked tooth. I didn’t know yet that I had a concussion that would last for months. The cherry on top. For some reason though, this was it! This was the moment that I had been waiting for, and right then and there, for the first time in my life, I decided that I wanted to live. I made a choice to stay.
Back in the chair, I felt a force, trying to push its way out through my skin from inside of me. I felt like I might burst. The whole room had become wavy. I had succumb to this new reality and accepted that I must stay and fight the enemy within, a dark entity that had been stealing my light, feeding off any joy or misery I might have ever experienced.
Then it was behind my eyes and my eyeballs bulged out of my face. I wondered if they might pop out of my head and roll around on the floor and as I worried about this, Ataana shouted dramatically, “It’s in your eyes now!!! It’s trying to blind you so that you can’t see its existence! Don’t let go of the stones!!!” I held the hot, heavy stones in my sweaty palms, held them for dear life. My brain had daggers shooting out of it as he yelled, “it’s in the top of your head, it’s going to leave through the top of your head!” And then I felt the force push swiftly out through the top of my head. “It’s still lingering around you! Don’t move, don’t let go of the stones!” And I obediently sat as still as a mannequin, moving only my eyes around, wondering if I might see some black, smoky thing flying wildly above me. I sat for awhile and Ataana finally approached me. He looked at me and smiled, “There you are,” he said, “It’s nice to finally see you.”
He allowed me let go of the stones as he took them from me gingerly, as if I had just handed him my dirty underwear. He brought them into the bathroom and washed them in the sink. Just like that. It felt anticlimactic and maybe even cheap to see him wash the stones that had just pulled out my dark entity, in the tap of a bathroom sink. I had the feeling of coming down after a hardcore mushroom trip, where you look around and everything that seemed so fantastical and significant was again back to regular, old life.
A moment later he came back with a large, pink and lavender crystal and placed it in my arms. I cradled it awkwardly, and waited for it to do its healing, while he shuffled about the store, looking at paperwork and checking his phone. Suddenly, the little, blonde, fairy-girl appeared. “Oh my goodness,” she exclaimed, “I didn’t know you were here!” It was odd, her not being able to see me, but now that the entity was removed, she could see me.
Could it be that literal? Was that was what was being inferred? I guess I hadn’t seen her either. Maybe she had just been in another room? Many years back, I had been a magician’s assistant at the Magic Castle, in Hollywood. Rocco (the magician) and I had all sorts of shticks and gags that we played off of each other, and I wondered if this too was all smoke and mirrors, and she was the magician’s assistant. I thought about this as I held the Sorcerer’s Stone.
Finally, I stood, shaky and exhausted. Ataana gave me a warm and generous hug. I wondered if it was about to get creepy, if he might lean in with his pelvis, but it did not and he did not. It was genuine and safe. “Will I be okay?” I asked, as he pulled back to look me, again, deep in the eyes, while answering with certainty, “You will be more than okay. You will thrive. Just be patient. The next few weeks might be uncomfortable, you might feel as if something is missing, and you will need to mourn this loss. Drink lots of water and we are always here for you.”
He handed me a new Unakite bracelet, which sort of surprised me as I’d forgotten about my reason for being there in the first place. I noticed that somehow three hours had passed. I left without him charging me, or trying to sell me anything. Feeling bewildered but hopeful.
The next morning, I remembered that something had been violently ripped out of me, because my solar plexus was genuinely, physically sore. I’d been stripped raw and couldn’t seem to shake the unsettling feeling that something was missing. I’d look around the room, and down at my hands, trying to put my finger on what it might be. I was consumed by a sense of grief and loss, that just kept crashing over me in waves, every time I almost caught my breathe, another wave. I cried for a month solid, like somebody had turned on the faucet and just left it running, left it on so the pipes wouldn’t freeze.
I wondered if it had been real, or maybe it was placebo, the power of suggestion. I thought about who I might turn to for assurance, who could validate my experience. Instead, right then and there, I decided that it was time to trust myself. I decided I was real, and magic is also real.
—holly solem
Flommist Holly Solem is a singer/songwriter, model, actress and writer known for her work on Amazon’s original series Hand of God, as well as playing, touring and writing with numerous bands and artists. Copyright © 2021–23 Holly Solem. Pictured: Paul Klee, Crystal Gradation (detail), 1921.
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