You got into Tarot cards last summer. Everywhere we went, the deck came. You read everyone’s cards — your sponsees, your mother, the pest control guy who never really fixed our rat problem. When you couldn’t sleep, you’d make coffee and pull out the deck, read your fortune over and over again. I’d hear you mumble to yourself, bang your fist on the table, forgetting someone else was in the other room trying to sleep. You always wanted to talk about it the next day, the meaning of things, the significance of your future. You told me the “Hanged Man” kept coming up, something about self-sacrifice. But later when I did my research, I found out it meant he was there of his own accord.
It started in Key West. I took you there for your birthday, a trip I spent way too much money on for how little we enjoyed ourselves. The first night we walked down Duval and saw a Tarot reader in the street. I wanted to keep walking, make it to the water to watch the boats go by. But you stood and watched, smoked a cigarette, craned your neck to try and see what she was saying. I didn’t believe in that stuff. I believed in God and thought ill of false idols. I thought to make oneself better, one must pray, talk to a space in the sky, focus outward. You stared at those cards, watched them flip and hit the sidewalk.
I didn’t tell you about LA, how I paid a psychic to remove a curse from my soul. I wouldn’t say how much I paid but it was a lot. My ex and I had gotten high on MDMA and stumbled upon her shop. The psychic made him wait outside and she told me someone in my life wasn’t who he or she said they were. I feared her more than God. Her teeth were crooked, bad. Her name was my name, but spelled differently, another version of me. When it was over, she made me write my phone number in her datebook. I told my ex it was bullshit, but she kept calling and I kept answering her calls.
She said she had candles at home. She said she burned them each night and that it wasn’t working, still. She needed more money. I met her at her “office” in Westwood and she wore a poncho. She stood there with her palm reached out towards me, waiting for the money. I had an envelope and I wish I could say I put it back in my purse and ran. But I gave it to her and blocked her number. I worked extra hours to make the money back. I worked through Christmas and New Years. I watched dailies and screeners and prayed that I did the right thing.
Your neighbor started doing it too. He became better than you at reading the cards because he took the time to look up what they meant and tried to apply logic to the mysticism. You stayed locked in magic, never dipping below that place where one might not want to look. Our friends chose his readings over yours.
You stopped toting around the cards. You started going swimming at 5AM. You started watching documentaries on foreign problems. You were no longer interested in your future.
When I came back to Florida and met you, I thought it was God giving me another chance. But whatever had me then wasn’t done with me. I started getting headaches like I used to get in the city. I thought it was the glow of the screen from watching all those tapes, the crunching of my vertebrae sitting in those chairs at work. But maybe something else was making its way into my veins, my very being. I didn’t work in an office anymore. I didn’t have any deadlines. Maybe you didn’t do anything wrong, but it sure feels like it.
By the time we got to the water that night in Key West the boats were all docked. Their lights were off like they went to sleep. I stood there anyway staring into the black. All I could do was stare, pretend I saw something important out there.