6. SPLIT (Lovers)

“Choice isn’t what or who—
it’s between you and you.”

The Lovers Reversed

(Scroll below lyrics to read about the song)

[Intro]
I used to think love was conducting,
maybe it’s a conversation I keep interrupting.
Crow says—"Pick a self, any self."
I nod, halfway gone.
Ghost laughs—"You first." I’m on the shelf.
prayed for wings,
panicked when the ground fell.
Love leans left, loss leans right,
I am the lovers’ split.

[Verse 1]
not tired from doing too much —
More from doing everything half-touched.
clean when I’m angry — easier to fix,
TV on so thoughts don’t mix.
read texts twice — look for what I missed,
watch who they look at,
pretend I don’t exist.
jealousy is logic — "I knew it, I knew it"
I don’t shout, I collect clues.
empathy erases me.
hope is embarrassing —
rage is railing; climb to see.
one hand on the door
in case the past finds key.
I’ll be whoever they need me to be
Crow says:
"Choice isn’t what or who—
it’s between you and you."

[Pre-Chorus]
ghost says, "I’ll never fit in."
I test for safety — trauma steps in.
Crow says, "Your life’s a rerun."
"I just like knowing when it’s coming undone
each thought’s a seed or a snare I spin
split learns not to worship what kept it in"

[Chorus]
Lovers split — one’s fear, one’s wish.
One wants calm, one loves conflict.
Love me, leave me, I exist between.
Commitment itches where comfort is.
Shapeshifter split — don’t know who deserves.
The self I serve, or the self I swerve.
Lovers split — half allowing, half afraid.
Lovers split — I reach, then barricade.

[Verse 2]
buy candles I never light — I’ll relax one day.
stay up late rewriting what I meant to say.
ask, "you okay?" but I mean, "am I safe?"
keep receipts on kindness — in case I’m tried.
love turns to math, fear amplifies
I love the idea of you.
crow hums, "grief’s just comfort you reuse."
I’m loyal till I’m cornered, honest till I’m bored.
chemistry out of conflict—it lasts more
Keep testing for safety — more trauma steps in.
truth is — I panic when someone commits
Crow laughs, "You keep dating your yesterdays."
it’s not finding the one that remains,
"Become the one who stays."
I was never divided — just afraid,
to bury the dream I’d already made.

[Pre-Chorus]

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
teach me the taste of wrong,
so I can crave want.
I forgive the fear—it meant I was near.
split’s not the scar, it’s the seam.
union was always waiting between.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
When pain rings—it’s you, calling you.
To live is to choose.
Gate sealed, the day is new.
funeral continues
the next ghost rides.

Card & Ghost

Tarot Card: The Lovers (Reversed)
Thoth Name: The Lovers (Unchanged)
My Ghost: Split
Zodiac/Planet: Gemini
Hebrew Letter: Zayin (ז) — sword
Path: 17

What It Means Reversed:
I'll be whoever you need me to be, then resent you for not knowing the real me.

About the Song

The Lovers card always confused me. I thought it was about romance, about finding the one. Then I learned the Hebrew letter for this card, Zayin, means sword. I started to understand: the split was never between two lovers. It was between me — the self that reaches and the self that runs.

I keep one hand on the door even during tenderness. I call it self-protection. Crow calls it rehearsal.

This ghost learned early that being fully known meant being left. Not left in a physical sense — the kind of abandonment that packs a suitcase. The quieter kind. The one where you're in the same room but no one sees you. Where your voice gets a prize for staying silent. Where presence becomes performance, and performance becomes the only proof you exist. So I became fluent in adaptation. I mirror whoever's nearby, call it empathy, then crash later because I forgot to bring myself along.

I ask "you okay?" when I mean "am I safe?"
I keep receipts on kindness in case I'm tried.
I buy candles I never light.
I stay up late rewriting what I meant to say.
I say "I'm fine" like punctuation.

Then I resent them for not knowing the real me — the one I never showed them.

This song is the sound of that resentment cracking open. The moment I stop blaming the mirror for showing me my own face.

What This Ghost Is

Split is the version of me who lives in the space between inhale and exhale. She projects stability onto someone else and then panics when they reflect something real. Her core wound: connection equals self-erasure. Her survival strategy: mirror whoever's nearby.

She asks "do you still love me?" not because she doubts them. Because she doubts she's still there to be loved.

She has trained everyone in her life to give her compliments and reassurance when she seems upset. Then she resents that they don't see her when she's calm. That's her pattern dressed in praise. So she creates more conflict, to get more attention.

She doesn't shout when jealousy rises. She collects clues. She watches who they look at, reads between the lines, files every glance as evidence. She calls it intuition. It's hypervigilance with a notebook.

Her empathy erases her. She feels what you feel so completely she forgets she had her own weather. Then she crashes later — exhausted, empty, wondering why she's so tired from a conversation where she barely spoke.

She is not evil. She is excess memory. She learned early that being fully known meant being left. So now she leaves first — or hovers so close to the door that leaving is just a lean.

A ghost is not who hurt me. It's the self that flinched and stayed. A costume made from breath-holding. A decision loop dressed in praise. Split was never the wound — she was the shape I took to survive it.

The Lovers and The World are not traditionally paired, but in my body they arrived together.
To me, she is the sister to Mimic (The World). Split is internal division — the war between selves. Mimic is external dependency — the belief that I need someone else to complete me. Split asks which self do I serve? Mimic asks do I even have a self to serve? Together, they are the two faces of my BPD: the splitting between versions, and the chronic emptiness that fills with whoever is near.

Where It Lives in the Body

Split lives in my circulation.

Cold hands even when the room is warm. My blood hesitates, as if deciding which self to warm first. Energy spikes and drops without reason — I'm electric, then ash. My body doesn't know which version to fuel, so it fuels none of them fully.

She lives in my digestion.

Not a dramatic pain — just a persistent churn. I swallow what I should have said, digest what I should have kept, reject what I should have held. My gut has been negotiating for years: keep this resentment, purge this want, hold this fear a little longer. Louise Hay would say my stomach can't decide what's safe to take in. She'd be right. Every meal becomes a question.

She lives in my head.

The tension behind my eyes. The skull holds two conversations at once, each one arguing for a different outcome. I've been nursing a low-grade headache for years. It's the price of keeping every door open.

When Split releases, my hands warm first — color returning to the fingers. The churn in my gut settles, not because I finally chose, but because I stopped punishing myself for wanting. The headache doesn't vanish. It just stops being the loudest voice in the room. I exhale — not dramatically, just fully. The two selves stop arguing long enough to notice they share the same breath.

Tarot & Magick: The Lovers Reversed

Upright, The Lovers is about alignment — the moment your heart, mind, and body agree on a direction. It's sacred union, but not necessarily with another person. It's the marriage between what you want and what you're willing to become.

Reversed, that alignment curdles into comparison. I stop choosing and start measuring. I keep every door open because closing one feels like death. I call it discernment. It's delay dressed as depth.

The Hebrew letter Zayin means sword. In the Tree of Life, it connects Binah (understanding) to Tiphareth (beauty) — structure to heart. The sword doesn't wound; it defines. Every real love requires a cut: a separation from the fantasy version so the real one can breathe.

I spent years mistaking longing for love, potential for presence. I collected mirrors instead of relationships. I wanted to be chosen, but only if I didn't have to choose back.

Crow says: "Love that doesn't change you isn't love — it's décor."

Correspondences (from my study notes):

• Hebrew letter: Zayin (ז) — sword, discernment

• Zodiac/Planet: Gemini — twins, tension, two truths at once

• Element: Air — breath, exchange, the space between words

• Animal: The lionfish — beautiful, venomous, guards its heart

Why This Song Belongs Here

The first ghosts (Hesitator through Gatekeeper) built walls — hesitation, deflection, escape, control, doctrine. Split is the first one who looks at those walls and realizes she's been living in the doorway.

She comes after Gatekeeper, who guarded truth instead of living it. Split stops guarding. She starts listening. But what she hears first is her own fracture — the echo between the self that wants love and the self that fears it.

After Split comes Rider (The Chariot), who finally stops moving. Because I can't keep moving until I choose a direction. Split is the choice. The trembling yes. The exhale that decides to be breath.

She is the sister to Mimic (The World). Split shows the internal war. Mimic shows the external fallout. One without the other is incomplete. Together, they are the full arc of my BPD: the splitting, then the emptiness. The division, then the borrowing.

What This Song Is

This song does not comfort me. It confronts the lie that indecision is safety.

It asks one question: Can you love without losing yourself?

It teaches that potential is not a virtue — it's a postponement. It teaches that empathy without boundaries is just self-erasure wearing a cardigan. It speaks in the language of almost, then cuts clean through it.

Crow says: "You've been so afraid of being seen choosing wrong, you never chose at all."

What I Learned

I learned that I wasn't afraid of commitment. I was afraid of being seen while committed. I learned that my empathy was sometimes a way to disappear. I learned that asking "do you still love me?" was never about them — it was about me checking if I still existed.

I learned that the split isn't a flaw. It's a signal. It means I'm ready to choose.

How I Will Use This Card in My Own Readings

When I pull The Lovers reversed, I know Split is active. I can now check for:

• Am I treating indecision as safety?

• Am I keeping someone (or something) at mirror-distance so I don't have to be real?

• What would I choose if I stopped predicting the outcome?

Teachers who helped me understand this ghost:

• Crowley (via Lon Milo DuQuette): "Love is the law, love under will." Choice without will is just floating. I spent years treating love like a weather pattern — something that happened to me, not something I directed. Crowley's law asks: What do you actually want? Not what you think you should want. Not what they want. What you want. Then love from there. Split spent years asking "what do you need?" so she wouldn't have to answer "what do I want?"

• Abraham-Hicks: The gap between who I am and who I'm becoming closes when I stop telling the problem-story. Split loves the problem-story. She rehearses it, edits it, polishes it. Without it, she'd have to face the silence. Abraham taught me that alignment isn't earned through suffering — it's allowed through attention. I don't have to fix the split. I just have to stop narrating it as permanent.

• Steven Ray Ozanich: Indecision becomes symptom. The body will force a choice if the mind refuses. Split's chronic fatigue, her cold hands, her locked diaphragm — those aren't random. They're the body's patience running out. Ozanich taught me that every "maybe" I hold becomes a knot somewhere. The body doesn't negotiate. It just waits. Then it speaks louder. The cure isn't more analysis. One small decision. One exhale completed.

Questions I ask myself:

• If I stopped treating their mood as my weather, what temperature would I discover in myself?

• Where did I shape-shift today to keep someone comfortable?

• What would I want — if I weren't busy wanting what I think they want me to want?

A YHVH Spread Example

The YHVH spread is a four‑card layout I use when I want to look at a situation from four angles. Each position matches one of the four letters in the Hebrew name YHVH, and each also lines up with a court card, a suit, and an element. I never understood this until I started writing the album — it finally clicked when I could feel it in the songs. I'm still learning, so these notes are mostly for myself.

Here's the simple map I keep in my journal:

1. Yod — King — Wands — Fire
   The spark — where it begins

2. Heh — Queen — Cups — Water
   The container — how I hold it

3. Vav — Prince — Swords — Air
   The connection — how I move through it

4. Heh final — Princess — Pentacles — Earth
   The manifestation — where it lands

If I pull Split (The Lovers reversed) in this spread, here's what it might look like:

Yod (King / Wands / Fire — the spark):
The desire for union is real. I want to connect, to merge, to feel someone see me. But the split isn't a lack of wanting — it's a fear of cost. Every spark arrives with a question: what will I lose if I let this burn? So I hold the match.

Heh (Queen / Cups / Water — the container):
I hold love like a science experiment. I observe instead of enter. I take notes on their mood, their needs, their temperature — and mistake data for intimacy. The container is my own chest, but I've lined it with mirrors. Every feeling bounces back before I can feel it.

Vav (Prince / Swords / Air — the connection):
The connection is to potential, not presence. I fall in love with who we could be, who we could become, who I might finally be if they stay. I date futures, not people. The sword of Zayin should cut clean, but I keep it sheathed. I'd rather imagine the blade than feel its edge.

Heh final (Princess / Pentacles / Earth — the manifestation):
Nothing lands. The relationship stays half‑formed. The self stays half‑claimed. I stay in the loop because the loop feels familiar — the reaching, the pulling back, the almost. The cure is not more insight. One small choice. Embodied. A text sent. A want named. A door closed. Something that lands.

Somatic / Body Note

When Split is active, my hands stay cold. My diaphragm locks when someone asks what I want. My energy spikes and drops without reason. When she releases, my hands warm. A long exhale finishes. The lock opens. Not all at once — just enough to know it can.

Blessing

May you let the cut define, not divide.
May you let the wrong choice teach you, not sentence you.
May you trust that your own hand is enough to hold.
May you let the one who wants speak louder than the one who hides.
May you stop testing love and start feeling it.

A little crow's on the wire, keeping watch over you. 🐦‍⬛

A Note from My Study

I'm still learning. I don't have this down. I'm still living in the gap, still trying to become more like the music I write. I write for myself — so I can study, so I can hear the direction I want to go.

I'm working from Aleister Crowley's Thoth Tarot, the deck that became my study guide for this album. The correspondences (Hebrew letters, paths, planets) come from that tradition. These notes are just what I've gathered. If they help someone else, that's a gift. If not, they're just breadcrumbs from my own walk.

Split and Mimic are sister ghosts. One taught me I was divided. The other taught me I was borrowed. Now I'm learning to be whole — not because someone completed me, but because I finally stopped waiting.

— Thank you for witnessing.
Loui Crow