2. ESCAPIST (High Priestess)
The High Priestess Reversed
(scroll past lyrics to read about the song)
Reach for me — I feel the pull
I vanish in the space between hands.
[INTRO]
I rehearsed the exit so many times,
I forgot I was still alive.
This is the ghost
who taught me to leave first.
Escapist is me.
[CHORUS]
Reach for me — I feel the pull
I vanish in the space between hands.
Escapist —
Hide the want,
nonchalant.
I leave before you take my heart.
Escapist —
keeper of the cut.
I know how this ends before it starts.
Escapist —
I leave first.
(Escapist. Escapist)
[VERSE 1]
Ghost says unreadable makes me look strong.
It only ensures no one stays very long.
Leave lovers with riddles —
they circle the drain.
Details get twisted;
silence feels best.
Better I joke when eyes draw too near.
Cover the tremor,
disguise it as cheer.
Sleep through alarms,
chronic sickness grit.
Guard my thoughts,
locked archive.
Listen for the crack in conversations.
I know the sound of someone losing patience.
Ghost whispers: “You were never meant to be seen.”
I nod.
I’ve been practicing the in‑between.
Wait until it’s safe.
…I’ve been waiting…
Crow says:
“What if mystery is not the veil —
but the fear behind it?
What are you hiding from yourself?”
[PRE‑CHORUS]
I eclipse — leave the light, hold the frame.
Escapist —
I laid this maze, brick by thought, brick by shame.
Escapist — keeper of the half‑said, intuition denied.
Purist of the pause,
I let silence stand.
[CHORUS]
Reach for me — I feel the pull
I vanish in the space between hands.
Escapist —
Hide the want,
nonchalant.
I leave before you take your heart.
Escapist —
keeper of the cut.
I know how this ends before it starts.
Escapist —
I leave first.
(Escapist. Escapist)
[VERSE 2]
I use their future to keep my distance.
Safety is the ghost’s kiss.
She swears I’ll be used, deceived, betrayed.
Shoulders go rigid, warmth decays.
Something in me wants to be held.
Calculate the cost instead.
I hide the want.
nonchalant.
Ghost says: “Stay quiet — they’ve had a long day.”
Migraines pound night into gray.
Stay unknowable so I can’t be judged.
If I show what I’m feeling, they’ll call it a need.
I nod and smile, play harmless and small.
Every cough’s a prayer I can’t speak out loud.
Sink to the trench, no currents are kind.
I stay between leaving and living.
I laid this maze, brick by thought, brick by shame.
Empty the room before it fills me.
Built the labyrinth to keep them in doubt.
Now I’m the only one who can’t get out.
Crow says:
“The veil you wear is not protection.
It’s the shape you took to avoid detection.”
[PRE‑CHORUS]
I eclipse — leave the light, hold the frame.
Escapist —
I laid this maze, brick by thought, brick by shame.
Escapist — keeper of the half‑said, intuition denied.
Purist of the pause,
I let silence stand.
[CHORUS]
Reach for me — I feel the pull
I vanish in the space between hands.
Escapist —
Hide the want,
nonchalant.
I leave before you take your heart.
Escapist —
keeper of the cut.
I know how this ends before it starts.
Escapist —
I leave first.
(Escapist. Escapist)
[BRIDGE]
Ghost, you kept me from the fall.
Now let me risk the rise.
Crow says: “The veil is not a wall.”
I let the curtain fall.
I don’t know how this ends —
I take my place.
[CHORUS]
Reach for me — I feel the pull
I vanish in the space between hands.
Escapist —
Hide the want,
nonchalant.
I leave before you take your heart.
Escapist —
keeper of the cut.
I know how this ends before it starts.
Escapist —
I leave first.
(Escapist. Escapist)
[OUTRO]
Escapist ghost disintegrates.
I stand in the clearing.
The moon shows both faces.
I look at my hands. They are empty.
Crow folds her wings and waits.
“Good. Now you have something to give.”
The next ghost waits in the kitchen.
What will you give now that you’re not running?
Card & Ghost
Tarot Card: The High Priestess (Reversed)
Thoth Name: The High Priestess
My Ghost: The Escapist
Zodiac/Planet: Moon
Hebrew Letter: Gimel (ג) — camel, the one who carries between worlds
Path: 13 — from Kether (Crown) to Tiphareth (Beauty)
What It Means Reversed:
Mystery becomes avoidance. Silence becomes suppression. Intuition disguised as paranoia to find reasons to leave before I can be left.
About the Song
I disappear in the spaces between questions. When someone asks what’s wrong, I smile and change the subject. When love gets close, I vanish into fatigue, into mystery, into the safe blur of “I’m fine.”
But the Escapist lives loudest in my relationships. I’ve left almost every partner first. In high school, I heard a rumor that my boyfriend liked someone else—I don’t even know if it was true. But the fear got in, and I left him before he could leave me. I told myself I was clearing the way for them. I hoped I was wrong. They got together. My leaving made it real. And every relationship after, I carried that proof: See? You were right to leave. They were better off.
I still battle this. I’ve been married for five years, and I still catch myself thinking: He could find someone better. She’s more magnetic, more confident, a better fit. I still have to remind myself that he chose me, that he stays, that my leaving would be a story I wrote, not a truth he lived.
I learned the pattern young. In my family, heavy things were handled by turning toward something lighter. A hard truth landed, and suddenly someone was asking about the weather. I learned to hold my storms in silence, to let my calm be the mask that kept the peace. But the storms didn’t leave. They went underground. Into my lungs, my belly, my womb. Into the frozen shoulders and the migraines that pounded behind my eyes. I called it composure. It was suffocation.
What This Ghost Is
The Escapist is the ghost of withheld breath. She knows the truth, but she won’t speak it. She sees the storm coming, but she won’t let it break. Her stillness looks like wisdom; inside, it’s chaos.
She learned early that being known was dangerous. That silence kept her safe. That if she stayed unreadable, no one could hurt her. So she perfected the art of absence—vanishing mid‑touch, answering with riddles, making herself a puzzle no one could solve.
A ghost is not the abuser. It’s the self that flinched and stayed. A costume made from breath‑holding. A decision loop dressed in praise. The Escapist is not evil—she is excess memory. She is the freeze response dressed as transcendence.
Her ghost‑kisses sound holy: “Divine timing.” “Not yet.” “If you can’t read me, you can’t reach me.” But under the mystery is a girl who learned that if she surfaced, she’d drown—so she anchored herself to the ocean floor and called it depth.
In mythology, the High Priestess is Isis, who retreated into the marshes after Osiris was murdered. She raised Horus in secret, waiting until it was safe to emerge. The Escapist is Isis still in the marshes. The danger has passed, but she hasn’t come out. She’s still hiding her own creative power in the reeds, waiting for a safety that never comes.
I use their future to keep my distance. That’s the Escapist’s signature: I imagine a future where they leave, where I get hurt, where it all ends badly—and I use that imagined future as a reason to retreat now. I read the future to find reasons to leave first.
Where It Lives in the Body
The Escapist lives in my lungs—not shallow breath, but held breath. A vault where grief stacks itself, waiting for an exhale that never comes. She lives in my belly, where nausea rises when truth gets too close, churning like a tide that can’t decide to break.
In my womb, she knots unspoken grief into pearls. Ovarian cysts that pulse with everything I swallowed. In my hands, cold and pale, circulation withdrawn as if my own blood is retreating from the surface, afraid to be seen.
Migraines flare when I’ve been flooded with intuition I refuse to voice—too much knowing, no release. My throat locks around words I’ve practiced but never said. Sometimes my skin erupts, hives rising where emotion couldn’t.
Louise Hay writes that unexpressed grief lives in the body, that chronic illness can become a way to avoid intimacy, that suppressed intuition shows up as migraines. I felt that truth in my own bones before I ever read it. The body holds what the mind escapes.
Every symptom is the ocean speaking: Surface, or die.
Tarot & Magick: The High Priestess Reversed
In the Thoth tarot, The High Priestess is the Moon—cycles, tides, hidden knowledge. She sits between the pillars, guarding the veil of the temple. Upright, she receives wisdom. She waits, but she is ready.
Reversed, the stillness curdles into paralysis. What was mystery becomes avoidance. What was silence becomes suppression. The veil becomes a wall, and the woman behind it forgets there’s a door.
The Escapist is the High Priestess who locked herself in. She knows every secret, but she will not speak her own. She is the whale who refuses to surface, the moon that stays eclipsed, the tide that stopped moving.
Correspondences (from my study notes):
Hebrew letter: Gimel (ג) — camel, the one who carries between worlds
Planet: Moon — cycles, tides, hidden light
Element: Water — feeling, intuition, the deep
Animal: Whale — deep diver, song carrier, breath keeper
The moon teaches ebb and flow. When the tide doesn’t move, the ocean rots. The Escapist is the tide that forgot to turn.
Why This Song Belongs Here
The Hesitator was the first ghost—the spark that agreed to live. Deflector was the second—the voice that learned to point elsewhere. The Escapist is the third: the one who learned to disappear entirely.
After her, the ghosts keep building. The Smotherer will learn to hold so tight no one can leave. The Commander will learn to control because chaos once meant danger. But the Escapist is where the body learned to freeze—the survival reflex that says: if I vanish, I’ll be safe.
This song is the first surfacing. Not the final one—just the first. Enough to taste air, enough to remember that whales are not made to drown.
What This Song Is
This song does not stay silent. It breaks the surface. It lets the storm speak through coughs and migraines, through cysts and cold hands, through the words I swallowed for years.
It shows the Escapist for what she is: not wisdom, not depth—just a girl who learned to survive by disappearing. And it buries her with one breath: I surface, I breathe, the Escapist dies.
What I Learned
The Escapist taught me that silence isn’t wisdom—it’s a cage. That mystery without revelation is just hiding. That my body will keep the storm until I let it go.
She protected me once, when being known was dangerous. Now she’s ready to rest. And I’m ready to breathe.
How I Use This Card in My Own Readings
When I pull The High Priestess reversed, I know the Escapist is active. She’s the one who knows the truth and refuses to speak it. Here’s how I work with her.
When I pull this card reversed…
I check where I’m withholding. What truth am I sitting on? What conversation am I sidestepping? I ask myself: If I surfaced right now, what would I need to say? That question usually cracks the veil.
Teachers who helped me understand this ghost
Brené Brown: Silence is armor against vulnerability. The Escapist mistakes mystery for safety.
Pia Mellody: Withholding is a boundary issue—not letting yourself be seen because being seen feels dangerous.
Gabor Maté: The body learns to freeze before the mind has words for it. Suppressed emotion becomes symptom.
Pete Walker: The Escapist is the freeze response—the body’s way of surviving by disappearing.
Louise Hay: Unspoken grief lives in the body. Chronic illness can be a way to avoid intimacy. The body holds what the mind escapes.
The whale: Deep diver, breath carrier, song keeper. When it refuses to surface, it drowns.
Isis: She hid in the marshes to raise Horus in secret. The Escapist is still hiding, waiting for safety that already came.
Questions I ask myself when this card appears
What truth am I holding that needs to be spoken?
Where am I calling mystery what is really fear?
Am I using my intuition to connect—or to predict reasons to leave?
What would happen if I let the storm break?
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 The Escapist (High Priestess reversed) in this spread, here’s what it might look like:
Yod (King / Wands / Fire — the spark): The knowing is there from the beginning. I sense the truth, but I don’t speak it. The spark stays hidden.
Heh (Queen / Cups / Water — the container): I hold the truth like a secret, safe in the deep. I make myself the container for everyone else’s feelings, but I won’t let them hold mine.
Vav (Prince / Swords / Air — the connection): I show up through absence. I’m present, but I’m not there. I answer with riddles, keep the connection at arm’s length.
Heh final (Princess / Pentacles / Earth — the manifestation): If I keep this up, the truth calcifies. The unspoken becomes illness. The only way out is to let the storm break.
Somatic / body note
The Escapist lives in my lungs—breath held, grief unexhaled. She lives in my womb—unspoken truths knotting into cysts. In my hands—cold, circulation withdrawn. In my head—migraines that come when I’ve been flooded with too much intuition and refused to voice it. When I finally speak, the breath finishes. The knots loosen. The storm breaks.
Blessing
May your silence crack open when it needs to.
May the storm you’ve been holding find its release.
May you surface before you forget you have lungs.
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.
— Thank you for witnessing.
Loui Crow
