I am not rebirth. I am return, the same blood, different skin.
The kind that was witch once, and will be again, because the world never lets that haunted ash settle.
Eyes follow. They always have. They always will.
My last self came up gasping in 1908, wrapped in modest silver, and at eighteen stepped into OCAD on McCall, in the shadow of the AGO. She painted like breath, drew like prayer, and left with honours in 1930, though honours meant little to the dead.
She found a professor who kept an island on a lake south of Algonquin, some said it was unmarked on most maps, as if the water agreed to forget it.
The cabin there was old before she first sketched it. By the early seventies, when she returned with trembling hands and tired bones, it was ancient in a way that had nothing to do with wood or nails.
She wanted peace.
But peace does not anchor at the deepest part of the lake.
Something else does.
And it remembers her name.
