Moldavite Wants to Be Free

more memoir-style writing

There’s a yoga studio I go to in Chicago, third floor of an office building between a tax preparer and a wholesale jewelry importer. The elevator only works half the time. As you walk into the dirty glass doors of the building, you smell fish and urine.

Inside, it’s always too crowded, mats overlapping, everyone’s belongings piled against the walls like a storage unit. The whole place reeks of palo santo and desperation. Last week the teacher told us we’re all just light-beings having a human experience.

There are highs people spend their whole lives chasing, and mine is wholeheartedly, unequivocally believing in bullshit. I want a very specific kind of bullshit though. The kind you find between a Massage Envy and a cell phone repair shop. Mediums who take Venmo or Zelle. Psychics who also sell LuLaRoe and swear the patterns contain sacred geometry. A reiki master who keeps her certificates from online courses framed above a water feature she bought at HomeGoods.

Echo Mehta was everywhere at NYU. Mostly on Facebook, but also in night clubs and lit readings at KGB Bar and warehouse parties and house parties and rooftops in the Meatpacking District where people did coke, right there, out in the open. She studied marketing but dropped out junior year. She was beautiful in that way that made you forget what you were saying mid-sentence. And she wore lavender lipstick. Not purple, not mauve. Lavender. I’ve been trying to find that exact shade for over ten years.

I met her in a summer acting workshop where she performed a one-act about alien abduction. All the parts herself, including the aliens, who spoke in what she claimed was authentic light language. The professor kept looking at his watch. I stayed after class to ask her about it.

Have you ever liked something so much that it gives you nightmares? THAT is how I felt about Echo. She had big, wide set eyes, like Kate Moss. A flat nose. Childlike - neotenous - but not so much so she didn’t look like an adult woman.

Echo weighed exactly 98 pounds, which she brought up constantly while explaining how she was learning to survive on prana alone. She had once been in Interview magazine. She interned for Purple, for Oyster. She was a model. She was that special kind of New York cool that is impossible to explain to people who have never seen it first hand. She went to psychic fairs and could read auras. She dated a guy in finance. She dated another model. She dated a man who went by Lazuli, who had dreads and read cards in Washington Square Park. None of these people ever seemed embarrassed by her. And she wasn’t embarrassed by them, either.

Echo taught me about moldavite, how it was formed by meteorites, how it could accelerate your spiritual evolution so fast it would ruin your life. She wore a piece around her neck that she’d shoplifted from a metaphysical store in the East Village.

“They’re overcharging anyway,” she said. “Moldavite wants to be free.”

Echo had a secret Facebook group where she shared Pleiadian downloads. About thirty of us, mostly NYU grads working jobs we were overqualified for. I was an archival producer for American Experience, the PBS show, which sounds more impressive than it was. Mostly I watched old footage and wrote timestamps.

The parts of my life I remember with the most tenderness always involve unconditional acceptance of people like Echo. That yes, Echo was a starseed. That yes, these crystals contained ancient wisdom. That yes, the universe was desperately trying to communicate with me through angel numbers and parking spots.

Echo’s posts started gentle.

“The Pleiadians want you to know you’re loved.” “Your struggles are preparing you for your mission.” Then came the warnings. The dimensional shift. The purge.

“Not everyone will make it to New Earth,” she wrote one night at 3 AM. “Millions will choose to exit rather than ascend. This is their soul contract. Do not mourn them.”

Once, Echo invited me to her apartment and served me golden milk. This was before you could buy golden milk at a coffee shop. Back when it was a special drink only Echo knew how to make, with dried roses floating to the top, and too much turmeric burning my mouth. She touched my forehead with her sticky hands, her face close to mine. Her breath smelled like cigarettes and rot.

“You’re opening your third eye too fast,” she told me. She said that my soul was from earth, not the stars. She held my hand. She burned sage and Nag Champa.

“When I met you, I didn’t think you were that energetically connected. You seemed dead inside. Like there was nothing there. But you’re not. You have it. You’re special.”

There was a woman in our group, Lauren, who had bipolar disorder. She stopped taking her medication because Echo said pharmaceuticals lowered your vibration. She gave away her furniture. She started calling estranged family members to tell them she’d see them in the next density if they made the cut.

Echo never broke character. I’d heard her on the phone with her mom, sounding completely normal, complaining about student loans. But when Lauren posted increasingly unhinged messages, Echo just responded with more Pleiadian wisdom.

The intervention came from David, this pudgy Marxist kid who’d joined partly as a joke and partly because he had a crush on Echo.

“This is fucked,” he told me over terrible coffee at Veselka. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”

I defended Echo. I said Lauren had her own issues. I said we all knew it was metaphorical.

What follows is blurry, maybe from shame. David screenshotted our conversations where I’d admitted to doubts, where I’d joked about Echo’s downloads. He shared them with the group. I was expelled first, my vibration too low for the coming shift. The betrayal felt physical, like something had been ripped out of my chest. The whole community collapsed within a week.

Lauren ended up hospitalized. David went back on everything he said, started posting about mercury retrograde. Echo mourned the loss, cryptic Facebook statuses about how she couldn’t trust people anymore. Sympathy pouring in from everywhere. From writers and models and Chloe Sevigny.

I missed the group immediately. Not the drama, but the feeling of being connected to something vast and mysterious. My ex-husband and I were living in Middle Village, Queens, in an apartment crawling with roaches, an hour from anything that mattered. Every day I’d watch WWI footage then take the train home to nothing.

So I developed a ritual. Every day after work, instead of going straight home to Queens, I’d take the subway to Manhattan. Sometimes to Namaste Bookshop, sometimes to crystal stores on the Upper East Side where rich women bought amethyst geodes for their foyers. I’d stand in front of walls of tumbled stones, intuitively feeling their energies, waiting for one to call to me.

And they did call.

Even knowing it was bullshit, I could feel the rose quartz promising to heal my heart, the black tourmaline offering protection, the labradorite whispering about transformation. My checking account dwindled but my apartment filled with stones. Oracle decks in candy colors featuring mermaids and unicorns. Statues of deities I barely understood. Ganesh, who Echo had assured me was “the Hindu god who specifically comes to white people.” Quan Yin for compassion I couldn’t find anywhere else.

I felt, for brief moments, holding a piece of celestite up to the light or pulling a particularly synchronistic oracle card, like I could access whatever dimension Echo lived in. Like I could be that certain, that special, that magical.

A flaw of mine that’s only become worse as I’ve aged is that I don’t admire people, I envy them. My brain runs this constant calculation, a detailed accounting of who has what and why it’s okay I don’t have it. Why the karma works out. The calculations balance, but only briefly. The envy just finds new targets, metastasizes into new resentments.

But Echo inspired something different.

Later, when I briefly joined a Wiccan coven, so did Swann, the high priestess who ran things. With them, my place in the hierarchy was so clear that envy became impossible. They were teachers, I was student. And that’s how it should be, that’s how I liked it.

I think that’s what I’m always seeking: an authority so absolute it overrides my critical brain. But it has to feel earned. The coven fell apart when I met Elder High Priestess Ravyn. She shopped at Ulta and ate at Buffalo Wild Wings. She wore those transition lenses that never quite clear up indoors. Then she’d turn around and claim she was “of the fae,” of a special bloodline, while the rest of us were just boring humans who were shut out of the higher realms.

I wanted transcendence, not someone’s wine aunt playing dress-up. So I left that too, politely, claiming work conflicts, and never went back. People tell me to find Christ, that I’d like it there. But that’s not what I want. I am not a Christian.

I want magic.

Every ending is a false ending. I am still in purgatory. Last month I paid $75 to lie on the ground of a re-purposed office space and hyperventilate while a woman in palazzo pants played a singing bowl. I cried so hard I thought I was dying. She said that was energy blockages leaving my body.

Sometimes unable to sleep, I’ll see someone from those days, while scrolling. Once, I saw Echo dancing across my TikTok For You Page. Still posting about starseed activations and twin flame journeys and the coming age of Aquarius. She’s an astrologer now.

She seems so...certain. So held by her beliefs.

There is a reason for everything, isn’t there? Even if that reason is complete bullshit.

The crystals collect dust in a bowl in my basement. Sometimes I take them out and hold them, hoping to feel something like I did when I was 22. But they’re just rocks now. Pretty rocks, some of them, but rocks nonetheless. The oracle cards ebb and flow. Sometimes the spirit moves me again, but only sometimes.

I am still investigating, always investigating.