on the small teasing infinities of angel numbers
and my favorite Zora Neale Hurston quote (read: I could not scrape these words from my mind if I tried)
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Hi friends,
I think about the following Zora Neale Hurston quote often. So often that sometimes, it doesn’t actually factor—its stickiness rubbed raw. Like angel numbers, which pop up for me every single day.
All last year, a steady staccato beat of 808, 555, 222, and if I was really Feelin’ Lucky a series of 7s. Array of beaks open as if readying to spill forth a stream of dollar bills1. In the car, on the street, heavy clumps of phone numbers, from the microwave’s bland gaze. There was a night I ran into someone I was not ready to see, and a chain of 8s warned me, and after that I did not trust those small teasing infinities for some time.
And yet it remains: all December the words knifed my thoughts. Bright flash with each, as if hearing and being heard for the first time. “There are years that ask questions,” Zora said into my ear. Okay, okay, I thought, not wanting to admit that 2023 may be one of 'em.
“And years that answer,” she finished, like she does each time.
Sometimes you don’t know for years, again or not at all, afterward.
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”
—Zora Neale Hurston
I’ve never been much of a numbers person. I dream in poetry, regularly forget routine passcodes. Grasping the empty, filling its spaces with words, with words, with words; and it’s not even that I can’t be quiet, because I can, especially when I feel anxiety’s fingers at the base of my skull, in the back of the throat. But the numbers! Tattooing a drumbeat as I walk. License plate after license plate. Strings of time fumbling an otherwise unmarked expanse. As I’m thumbing through social feeds, each new healer or practitioner after the next reflecting them back at me. Flinging, repeating, inverting, multiplying. And of course, if I could count all the times someone has asked me: “What do they all mean?”
Each set a numerical bloom. Single dried rose unfurling from a dusty old wine bottle. Sacred growths bursting, stem cuttings crafting a forest in miniature. Each a veritable world.
The tremor of nothing, too. Again and again. Signals traverse, go continuously unnoticed. If we think of each angel number as an opening, some close before we can enter; others are only ever a thought, an open hand palming a single blade of possibility. Un-serrated, the wound.
Still, I can’t help but avail my grasp to them. After all, when we ask questions, they answer. We don’t always trust ourselves to allow in their meanings; but sometimes, we learn that there can be a kind of shivery gorgeous pleasure in the asking. And that it can be as ordinary a thing as a cathartic rush of insight at 3:33 on the clock.
A few errant thoughts from your witchy writer friend:
I’d be utterly remiss not to include the above meme in any missive about angel numbers. Lol.
Turns out it’s pretty emotionally jarring to go from full force in a corporate/tech role to straight up “funemployment” without warning (no shame in the use of that term, I will continue using it thanks!!!). I have whiplash. I’ve been fighting the feeling that I have So Many Things to do, check in on, respond to, and/or jump on a video call to address every day. Ugh, not cute.
Luckily I’ve spent the week
languishingattempting to heal my burnout at my sister’s place in Venice Beach, CA—where I will gladly admit my privilege but also drinking up the sunshine here has been so, so good for my soul.Back on Instagram, but doing it in a mindful way. I’m determined to be intentional about this thing.
Til next time,
xx Kimia
All while the TikTok girlies chant in unison in the background: “I don’t chase, I attract. What belongs to me will simply find me…” All while readying for war, the algorithm, the world through the eyes and experience of a woman.