I can still smell lemon tea

It’s not like I actually thought I was going to marry Val Kilmer.

I mean, ok, the Ouija board said I would.

And I was already half in love with him.

But I was barely 14.

And he was Batman.

The night we summoned Sister Daphne, we were gathered on my bedroom floor, limbs brushing in a circle, candles flickering dangerously close to the carpet. The air was thick with patchouli incense. Someone had spilled a vial of Gap Dream perfume and the scent was blooming wildly.

We were 13 or 14, sweet and feral. Our mouths sticky with lip gloss. Maybe you remember: the kind in the tin. Candy Apple.

We were playing Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, and, to this day, I swear Bethany floated. Just a little. Maybe an inch. But we felt it. That lift. That break in the rules of the cosmos.

We squealed.

Then we pulled out the Ouija board — Parker Brothers, nothing fancy, but it worked. The planchette moved like it had purpose. It spelled out D-A-P-H-N-E. “Sister Daphne,” she insisted. “With a ph, not an f. And no Y, for heaven’s sake.”

She told us she was a spirit.

A former nun with a weakness for lemon tea and grand romantic futures.

She said I was destined for someone luminous. Someone named Val.

“Val Kilmer?” I whispered.

The planchette slid.

Yes.

I gasped. The girls gasped. The candles flared. And somehow, in the hormone-haze of 90s adolescence, this felt completely plausible.

I was already obsessed. I mean, BATMAN. Come on!

He wasn’t just an actor — he was smoke and fire and wildness. And Sister Daphne said he was mine. I lived in LA. It didn’t feel totally impossible. Maybe, I thought, in 10 years, we’d find each other. Maybe at a poetry reading at a café in Los Feliz and he’d smile. Maybe we’d know.

But of course, that didn’t happen.

“Sarah, we’re Jewish,” my mother reminded me.

And besides, my first heartbreak was Tal, not Val.

Sister Daphne got it wrong by two whole letters.

The Ouija board got put in a storage bin somewhere – alongside my flannel shirts, my Lisa Frank stickers, the empty tin of Candy Apple  lip gloss and my CD of Jagged Little Pill.

The candles burned down. We grew up.

And then just now I heard that Val Kilmer had died.

And something strange and sad opened in me – a kind of grief. Like a trapdoor beneath a long-forgotten memory. Not because I thought I’d marry him – not really – but because Sister Daphne said I might. Because some part of me once believed I could.

Because there was a time when the world felt cracked wide open, and the veil between the possible and the impossible was thin enough to poke a finger through. A time when we lit candles and summon spirits and convinced ourselves that anything was possible.

That belief? That magic? It gets packed away. Labeled. Stacked in storage. Along with the Ouija board.

But here’s what I wonder now, in this life made of email passwords and dry shampoo and news notifications and existential questions:

What if the real portal wasn’t the board at all, but the moment we asked the question? What if spiritualism is just a form of wild willingness? A refusal to believe that the story is closed?

No, I never really thought I’d marry Val Kilmer. And in fact, I haven’t thought about that nifht in years. But when I was fourteen, I believed in things I couldn’t see. Maybe part of me still does, Or needs to.

And now, maybe, I believe in something even bigger and more wonderous:

That I can still open my own windows.

That love and mystery and absurdity don’t die, even when the stars do.

And maybe, somewhere in the dark, the planchette still moves.

We never stop summoning things. Not really. We just call it memory. Or inspiration.

I can even smell lemon tea and taste candy apple lipgloss