Our guide’s hair was a bit wild, her eyes an unnerving pale blue. I think this is required if you are going to channel someone’s energy: it makes your hair stand on end. I drew the last card from the pile, laid it face up. My friend, also having her cards read, sucked in her breath. There before me was “the tower”, with two people falling out of a fiery inferno.
“What does that mean?” I asked anxiously. Hurling yourself from a fiery inferno could not be a good sign.
“Weeeellllll”, she started, and then went on to say it doesn’t have to be a bad thing, it could just mean change in my life, transition….. I’m thinking… bullshit. This is a bad card.
My friend went next. She also pulled this card last, and we both laughed. Maybe Vancouver was getting an earthquake. Maybe we were both going to get hit by the same bus. My other girlfriend had nothing but horrible news, which didn’t make her very happy. But maybe…maybe this was all a giant pile of crap.
I’m all for having a good time, and this seemed like a good idea. My girlfriends and I decided that we could use some insight into our lives, good or not, and what better way than by asking someone who could supposedly communicate with spirits? Now that I write that, it occurs to me, what if the spirits you communicate with are stupid? You could get a drunken lazy spirit sitting on some spirit couch scratching his invisible nuts and giving out random information, just to mess with people. You know, maybe he’s pissed off about his earthly couch being gone, so he’s going to pretend to be a wise spirit and then create shit-storms in people’s lives, all the while eating Cheetos and drinking beer in the afterlife. I’m thinking some people’s afterlives have Cheetos. Anyway.
For weeks I tried to pretend that this didn’t weigh on me from time to time. Something bad would almost happen and I’d think…OOOHH, maybe that’s my tower. Ok, crisis averted! Then I’d think, wait, you can’t outrun your destiny. So that means the bad thing hasn’t happened yet, and then I’d wait for an anvil to fall from the sky. No anvil came. This was all a bunch of hooey, right? I mean, we had decided the “reading” would just be an interesting thing for us to do. The problem is, when she read my “aura” or whatever fuzzy eminence I exude, she got a lot of it right. She was pretty much bang-on, in fact. Things I hadn’t told people, all of that. It spooked me. I do believe there are those who can feel things differently from the rest of us, and that their minds travel on different pathways. From this, I concluded that perhaps my cards did have something to them…
While we were on vacation, I couldn’t help but think, ok, maybe I’ll get bitten by a shark. That would pretty much be the worst thing that could happen. I’d already talked to myself about it. I could lose a limb or two and still have a full life. I’d have a great story and some bite marks, too. But, it would all be ok. With the proper medication, I would be able to sleep again, one day. I tried to push this thought aside as we snorkeled, as we swam in the shallow waves. Sharks don’t come in this far to shore anyway, I told myself.
One bliss-filled afternoon I was shaking out the sand from a towel, and I heard my son, yelling from the ground.Moments before his buddy had been scrambling up a tree, swinging from it, an old oak with many limbs (a bit too high for my liking).
“Help!” he cried. “My back!” Tears were leaking from one eye and he wasn’t moving. The Dads were on it immediately, down at his side, taking a hold of his hands.
“Squeeze,” our friend said, and he could. His breath was raspy, a look of terror in his eyes. No one had seen him fall. My Tower card loomed before me.
A fall. A look of terror.
I had a momentary time warp where I could do nothing but look down on him. These are the moments you know for sure. There is nothing I fear more than my child being seriously hurt. Let a shark eat me, fine. Just don’t let my kids be hurt. After a few minutes he was sitting up. He’d had the wind knocked out of him, and he’d landed hard, but he hadn’t fallen out of the tree, like I’d thought, only swung from the branch, lost his grip, and launched himself into the dirt. He moved to a chair to eat a sandwhich, upset but clearly ok. Inwardly I was a total mess. Unbeknownst to everyone, I’d thought my worst fears were coming true.
That’s when I decided to call it.
Enough is enough. Take your cards and shove them, you Cheeto-eating spirit bastard. There’s real shit to worry about, much less things I can make up in my own mind, thankyouverymuch. My last card? It’s a TRANSITION. I am transitioning back to reality, where you never know what’s coming around any corner, and you’ll just have to face it when it comes.
I came home a much happier person, a much more thankful one too. I heard later that two days after we left our favorite beach a shark attacked a snorkeler, in about five feet of water. Ha! Missed your chance, you big shark a-hole! Better luck next time! And next time, I’m not even going to worry about it.