My dear readers, I really wish I could tell you that this isn’t a true story. Like even a little bit. Unfortunately, I can’t do that. This is the very real story of that time I went to a psychic (and some other bits and pieces of my life around that time and afterwards). I found it in an old blog of mine and spent a good 3 minutes laughing so I thought it qualified for re-posting, no matter how embarrassing.
*it was also written two years ago today when I found out so that’s pretty neat
March 3rd, 2013.
March 2011. One year after I had finished high school. Working a job I didn’t like much but kept me busy. Saving money, biding time in a town by the sea. It was before I knew that I’d know you and then suddenly you were there. Hey listen, I’m sorry I started that fire in your kitchen. I guess that’s what I get for putting an electric kettle on a hot burner.
I have decided that it is true, the whole thing about leaving parts of yourself everywhere that you go. I think of myself at 10, starting fights with boys in the school yard and getting dragged into the principles office for disturbing the peace. In my defense though, they were always pulling on my hair. I think of myself at 12, riding bikes around the neighborhood in Washington. All the palm trees in LA. The jumping beans that jumped until they died on the dashboard in my Aunt’s car while we drove through Mexico. And then summer last year, side by side in the kitchen. Your hand on the small of my back. While you cooked I rubbed my bare feet together, cranked up the radio, tugged at my slip, chewed on my hair. The kitchen door was ajar, the floors were dusty. I didn’t have any men in my life but I had you and the long, hot nights. Your hand across the table. A cold meal. A closet full of lace slips and a house to lounge in while wearing them.
I always write about people as if they were so important. The thing is, I can’t remember how important you were or anyone else really was. I forget 240 days out of 365 and what I do remember, I piece together. I keep thinking lately about the man who might come along at some point and how I don’t know him yet. I wonder sometimes, in bed alone, if he be made up of all the men I’ve known so far. I really hope not. For his sake and for mine. I confess that I have not had the best taste so far.
I’m not ready to face him yet but I know he’s out there. I feel him sometimes when I wake from lonely dreams. I know there is an embrace somewhere in this world that will bring me back to earth. Remind me to be salt always. First, I have to be my own hand, my own heart and then it can be his hand, his heart.
Everyone I know is falling in love. I am falling (literally) into books. Into myself. All things about me are still hypothetical but I pursue everything with vigor. I am particularly in love with my new tattoo. The flood, the flood and now suddenly all this rain. I want to yell and run through fields naked. Instead, I settle most nights for whiskey and my friends. Their warm bodies on my bed, talking while flipping through books or staring at the ceiling, hands on legs on faces on shoulders. Home is where the heart is and that happens to be somewhere in the tangle of our bodies after a bottle of decent liquor.
I will tell him about the summer I almost broke my foot after being dared to jump off the highest ledge of the pier. Still swam around like it was nothing. Hurt like hell. How the city was caked in heat and there was nowhere to run. Always at the beach, in the ocean. Watched the sand collect in my navel, down the sides of my sharp hips. How pale I was even underwater. I want to be moved. Not by a lover but by life. By the mountains. My own skin. Words. Books. Places. Everything. I have been so many people.
When I turned 18, I went to a psychic with a little bit of urging from one of my house mates at the time. I had been feeling so disjointed after graduating high school that she thought a “decent tarot reading” would do me good. Whatever that meant. It was hard thinking of things to ask the woman once I got there. Life stuff without getting too dark. I purposely avoided romantic questions. I wanted to know what would get me out of my funk and had no interest in love or romance. Still don’t. Probably used to tired, older women with someone in mind, she couldn’t resist talking about it before I left. I remember her grabbing my hands and rubbing her thumbs over the lines.
“You’ll meet someone when you are both too young. It won’t be the right time. You’ll fall apart after a couple years. Go off and do some growing up, it looks like. Then, you’ll find each other again in Newfoundland. Or he will have some kind of connection to Newfoundland. Something to do with Newfoundland. Newfoundland is going to be involved. Work? Family? Friends? Something.”
I had laughed, trying to pretend like it wasn’t directly at her. She dropped my hands then. “All my family is from Toronto and Montreal,” I couldn’t help giggling, “And this is the West coast. We live on the West coast. I don’t know a single person who has ever been to Newfoundland like even once.”
She sat back, pointing a finger at me, “Time’s up.” Then she stood and walked around the table to me, “Newfoundland. Just you wait.”
She did give me a tape of the session for whatever reason. It was like, thanks a heap lady but it’s 2010 and very few people actually have cassette players anymore. I did try to find it a year or two later with no luck. Sucked into the vortex of shit I didn’t care enough about to even bring home.
I wish I could remember more of what she’d said but it was all so ridiculous and stupid that I pushed it out of my head. Everything she’d told me had been vague but the last part was too specific. It had ruined the entire thing. Whatever man I was seeing at the time (or not seeing?) did not fit that description and had nothing to do with fucking Newfoundland.
I laughed afterwards. I cried. Not because I thought I’d find anything in Newfoundland but because I realized I’d visit one day, remember the psychic and feel stupid. The woman who discredited herself. I left that little room feeling more bewildered than I ever had in my life. For a week afterwards it was like someone had tacked an extra sentence onto a story I’d read 150 times before. Her room smelled like crushed flowers and she didn’t tell me anything with her tarot cards that I didn’t already know.
It’s the 3rd day of March in the year 2013. I am 20 years old. I’m dating the worst man. Literally. That is what my friends have nicknamed him. “How’s the worst man in the world?” My friend Nicole will say after he leaves our apartment or sometimes just before. She wants him to hear her. I skipped out on my first bar tab the other day, accidentally. Two years and two days ago you were standing in my door and how monumental that must have felt. I can’t really remember it now.
And then to think, one day I will meet someone. We will find ourselves on the same beach, in the same bar, library, house, backyard and find our way to each other. I want to warn him now that I am all trouble but I don’t think he will believe me. Even if he did I don’t think it would stop him from a single thing. Funny how life is like that, just a rodeo that keeps on going. And our memories, the things that stay with us, decide when and where to make themselves known, if ever.