It was not unusual for me to see the future- well maybe not the future so much as the present that I didn’t have physical access to. It was March 12, 2011, late at night or early in the morning, maybe. I slept soundly in my bed and dreamed that I was on a cruise ship in the Pacific between Hawaii and Japan. My boyfriend and I were arguing in the solarium on the uppermost floor. Suddenly a gigantic tidal wave reached out of the sea, dwarfed our large cruise ship, and inevitably crashed onto its top deck.
Our arguing commenced as the water dissipated from the boat, but then a second wave came, just as big if not bigger than the first and crashed onto the deck again.
I awoke to the news blaring. Something about an earthquake in Japan. It couldn’t be. Had there been a tsunami too? I wondered.
This uncanny sensibility can be used to my advantage. One night I received a picture text from a guy I was dating. It was a picture of this beautiful light display a local park always put up at Christmas time. It was nice that he was thinking of me, but did his date know or mind that he was texting me when he was with her? I decided to ask him.
“What do you mean?” He countered.
“What do you mean what do I mean? I mean…did whoever you were with mind that you were sending me picture texts while you were on a date with her?”
“What makes you think I was on a date?” I didn’t have an answer for him. I didn’t know how I knew, I just did. Silence ensued until the inevitable confession came, “Okay, you’re right, I was on a date– but really, how did you know that?”
After my best friend’s bachelorette party, we decided to crash at one of the bridesmaid’s apartments. Totally sloshed from a night of cosmos and appletinis, the group of us laid out across her living room like injured men in a overcrowded war hospital. However, the bridesmaid we were staying with didn’t want to go to bed, and decided that she wanted to call a guy friend of hers to come over and tuck her in.
When he walked in the door the other girls and I were already playing with the cards. With a deck of 52 blacks and reds, that is. With them, we asked questions about our futures, who would marry who and when. As soon as he walked in the door, he became intrigued by what we were doing. “Can you read me?” He asked. I wasn’t sure that I could read him, as I was barely able to make it up the stairs and to my friend’s apartment’s living room, but I wasn’t a quitter. I’d at least try. The other girls sat around us in a circle as the reading began.
“Okay, shuffle these and give them back to me when you’re finished,” I said handing him the deck.
“Okay…so when do you want me to stop shuffling them?” He asked. I looked at him perplexed.
“I don’t care- whenever you feel like it I guess,” nothing but professionalism here, no less than the best…“I’m going to warn you, though, I never used real playing cards before to do readings, so I’m not sure how accurate this I will be. Not to mention…I’m kinda wasted right now.”
“That’s fine,” he said smiling and handed me back the deck.
I flipped over a couple cards and had him pick out a few out too.
“Your father died when you were twelve?” I said very unsure of myself.
“How did you know that?” He asked, causing my mouth and everyone else’s in the room’s to drop open.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
I don’t know how I know. It is how I knew that the love of my then life was cheating on me before he ever uttered a word. Or how every time I go out with a new guy- I know that he’s not the one but so badly want it to be- that I determine myself to make it work even if it’s the last thing I do– which it usually is- the last thing I do before getting hurt or scarred one way or another.
Another thing about tarot- people tell you their darkest secrets, things you didn’t want to know, and other times you find things out that you didn’t want to see.
For Halloween, I’ve gone as a gypsy a few times. The last time I did this I brought tarot cards with me. To me they were just a prop, but everyone at the party took it more seriously. They formed a line, a newly wed cousin of mine sat down with me. His wife was the primary breadwinner in their marriage. In fact, I think it was his laziness that entrapped him in the union to begin with, she made everything so easy for him. But there I was thinking they were happily married, as I was at their wedding less than a month before, and then he sat down at the table with me.
“Do you see me and Cheryl being together for the rest of our lives? I mean, I love her but I don’t think I can do this forever. Do you see us divorcing in the future?” He asked anxiously.
Then there was the time I went to a work friend’s house. She’d been very stressed out with everything that was going on at work and it was her idea to run through a deck of cards once or twice to see if we could find an answer. Immediately I saw the issue: she was drinking too much, and possibly had a drinking problem.
“Are you drinking a lot lately?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, because I see you drinking and think that that might be the cause of all this undue stress.”
Her dismissal of my opinion made me begin to doubt my accuracy. It must’ve been garbage night that night, because when I left her home to walk to my car, I walked right by her recycling bins. I couldn’t help but notice one large plastic bin in particular because it was overflowing with empty bottles: beer bottles, hard lemonade bottles, and wine bottles.
All I have to say is the biggest lesson I learned from this is never doubt yourself.
Can you relate? Do you have any similar stories? Please share them in the comments section