Witchling Learning His Way

My great grandma was a witch, or a psychic, or whatever you wanna call her. My family is from a very small town in a rural part of Brazil, in a region known as the Paraíba valley. The words “witch” or “psychic” would’ve meant nothing to her, but that’s the best way to describe what she was in English. She didn’t have visions, but she could touch objects and know things about them that she had no way of knowing.

She could touch pictures and know whether the person in it was alive or not. She said living people had “life energy,” while dead people did not. Sometimes, she would touch a picture of someone and say their life energy was “flickering,” and that person would die soon afterwards.

She also found missing people. Although she was never a psychic for money (she made no money whatsoever from her “gifts” during her life), people would still come to her and ask for help. Perhaps most noteworthy was the mayor of her small town. His young adult son had gone missing, and the mayor was struggling to find him with the police, so he came to my great grandma as a last resort.

The mayor brought her a picture of his son. She touched the picture and said that his son was alive, that he was okay, and that he left town out of his own free will. She insisted that he was not hurt in any way, and that no one forced him to leave. However, she said that he would come home soon, as he would see “something dead” and it would scare him into coming home.

Sure enough, a couple of days later, the mayor’s son returns. It turned out that he had simply run away from home, but that he saw a dead dog in a park and it scared him so much he came home.

My grandpa died in June of 2021. One evening, I was walking around my apartment when a picture frame down the hallway caught my eye. It’s a picture of my grandpa holding me in his arms at my 5th birthday party. I never had thought much about that picture, but on that particular evening I was drawn to it. I picked up the picture frame, and the very second that I touched it, I knew my grandpa was dead.

And it was exactly like how my great grandma described. He had no life force. It was like looking at a taxidermy animal versus a real one. Sure, the taxidermy LOOKS like the real thing, but you can see it has no life. It simply looks dead. That’s exactly what my grandpa looked like in that picture.

So I put it down, and I walked to the living room, where I saw my mom putting makeup on in the mirror. I told her: “My grandpa’s dead, isn’t he?” My mother turned to me with a scared look in her face and said: “Your father just called me. He died 10 minutes ago.”

The first time I ever touched and object and knew things about it was when I was 15. For context, I almost froze to death once as a baby. I unwrapped myself on a very cold winter night and when my mother found me, I was blue and frozen. She’s an ER nurse and she genuinely thought that I was dead. Obviously, I turned out fine, but I did almost freeze to death as a baby.

Anyways, as a 15 year old, I was sorting some baby clothes at my family’s house. Picking them up, folding them, putting them away. It was a hot summer day in Brazil. However, I picked up this onesie, and I suddenly had the most terrible chill. It was like the cold of a grave- it gave me a sense of terror that I hadn’t felt before. I told my mom about it and she said that that was the onesie I was wearing the night I almost froze to death.

I was born on November 13th, which makes my star sign scorpio. Not only that, but my rising, mercury, and venus signs are also scorpio. I’m AFAB, and have been a feisty little shit my entire life. I have been talking back to people since the day I started talking. My very first word was “NO!” in Portuguese.

I definitely don’t have the same gifts as my great grandma though. I go the vast majority of my life touching objects and pictures and not knowing a single thing about them. And the times I have, I didn’t do it at will, it just kinda happened to me. However, according to my grandma, neither could my great grandma when she was my age. She had been “gifted” her entire life, but only learned how to control it and refine it as she got older. So who knows? I’m only 21 now.

I was staying at my grandma’s house at the time, so I told her about my dream the next morning. My grandma said “wait a minute!” and pulled out a box of pictures from under her bed. She said: “That’s what my mother wore to my wedding!” And sure enough, she shows me a picture from her wedding and my great grandma is wearing the EXACT same outfit I saw in my dream. The yellow dress, with the yellow flower on the shoulder, and that huge yellow hat.

For context, my grandparents had a very nasty divorce before I was even born, and so my grandma doesn’t have pictures of her wedding around the house. She has dozens of picture frames around her house, but none of them are from her wedding. She keeps all of them in a box under her bed which I had never seen before. In my dream, not only did I see her wedding, but I saw the exact outfit my great grandma wore on that day.