In the Cards

When I was in high school I used to go to the psychic. On Thursdays at the Elks club, they’d give free readings, so Takiah and I would go after class. Consultations occurred like this: you’d sit in a chair facing seven seated psychics. One lead psychic would find the color of your aura and the seven sub-seers would channel into your shade, sort of like a rainbow radio. When in contact with the psychics, one could never cross one’s legs of hands in order to allow all of the telling energy to flow freely.

In retrospect, I never gained any great knowledge from those visits. They only seemed to tell me facts that I already knew or that I was feeling. Obviously, it was cool that a stranger could know something so private, but no great prediction was ever made. Well, except that one time they said something big was going to happen to me when I was 26 years old. But, they would not tell me what it was. That, I had to pay for. So I opted to wait, for free.

Sophomore year I had a friend who kept complaining of a recurring dream involving a spider. Takiah and I tried to convince her to see the psychics, but this friend was an evangelist who called psychics “Satan’s workers”. So, after weeks went by and she could not sleep, she finally decided to contact the devil. Not the devil precisely, but one of his employees.

We took her to the consultation and she described her dreams in every detail she could recall to the seers. The head psychic then proceeded to ask her questions to which she responded. These inquiries were basic wantings-to-know about what had occurred the day before, what she ate, her birth date. He then asked her where her twin sister was. We all knew she had a twin, but the psychic did not, because her sister was in another city. He then said that what he was seeing might be too personal for my other friend and I to bear witness to and asked if Takiah and I should leave the room. But my friend said it was fine, we could listen to what the man had to say.

The psychic told her that the dream was connected to her birth, that there had been complications due to her mother’s addiction to cocaine and that her birth had been a quasi-death and the dream was left over from that time.

That was the end of our trips to the psychics, the novelty of hearing an unknown person tell you tid bits that only you could know, had worn off when we realized that all these recountings of our past did nothing to change anything that had ever occurred. If anything, they opened new wounds that we didn’t know what to do with. I suppose my friend’s dreams went away on their own, not because of any consultation, but because new experiences and thoughts naturally changed the course of her dreams. It’s curious how we always wanted to know what those psychics had to say, but the greatest lesson we acquired from our times there was that it’s best to leave the past where it belongs.