It was the first day of spring: that time of the year when the hope rushes in and sweeps away the winter depression. Tara put on a warm fluffy scarf and her favorite yellow coat and walked out of her house.
Once she was outside, the blinding sunlight hit her eyes. The bone-chilling wind forced her to hide her face in the scarf. Usually, Tara would sit by her window and watch this battle between the pale sun and the stubborn wind, both trying to take over the reins of the springtime. Today this was the last thing on her mind. Instead, she was on her way to see a psychic for the first time in her life.
Tara was skeptical about the whole idea of fortune-telling but she was willing to try anything to make the love of her life come back to her.
The first conversation Tara had with Paul was online. It was funny, a little awkward and with a touch of sweetness. After that, they met in person. Tara could not have imagined she could ever fall so hard for someone.
They had it all: romantic kisses and passionate nights, cute coffee dates and lazy stay-in dinners with greasy takeout food. They could talk about anything in the world. They had that kind of connection that can happen between two people only once in a lifetime, like an explosion that creates another universe, the spark that becomes a flame in an instant.
One day, Tara was checking her messages. Paul said that he would take her to this beautiful park she has not seen before. She was filled with excitement and anticipation; but as she was going through a myriad of conversation threads, she could no longer see his name in the list. After months of waiting and searching for his other accounts on social media, she realized that he was gone and there was no trace of him left...
Getting lost in her memories of the past, Tara almost did not notice how she arrived at the psychic's parlor which everyone in the neighborhood called "The House of the Witch". The psychic's predictions were so accurate that the locals truly believed she must have been some sort of a supernatural being.
Tara opened the door and entered the parlor. She noticed a woman in her fifties, sitting at the table in the middle of the room. The woman was wearing a long, fluorescent green dress and had a black peace sign tattooed on her left arm. There was a strong smell of grassy incense sticks in the shop which nearly made Tara faint but she quickly pulled herself together.
The psychic swiftly lifted her eyes and looked at Tara.
"You're here to find out if he will be back?" she asked.
"Yes," Tara answered in shock. How could the Witch already know that?!
The mysterious woman closed her eyes, picked up a deck of Tarot cards that was lying next to her and began shuffling it while chanting to herself as if she was talking to spirits.
What the hell? Tara thought, feeling terrified.
Finally, the psychic put down seven cards: The Magician Card, The Two of Cups Reversed Card, the Queen of Swords, the Judgment card, the Towers, the Sun and the Moon cards.
"He will be back," the Witch said, breaking the silence. "But you should never let him back into your life, he is not the one. He does not love you, he never will and he never did."
"Why else would he return if he never loved me?" Tara asked, taken aback.
"He will only hurt you. Stay away from him. What you want isn't real."
"Really?!" Tara screamed out. "What do you know about real love, you stupid witch! I should have never wasted my time coming here!"
In one quick motion, Tara angrily swept the cards off the table. The psychic did not move; Tara's outburst did not surprise her. Tara realized that the psychic did not care about her misfortunes and did not hesitate for a second before spitting out those harsh words right into her face.
Exasperated, Tara was feeling ready to storm out. Her gaze briefly stopped at the cards that were now scattered all over the floor. She noticed that the cards the psychic chose for her were lying in that exact same order and together they formed a path which looked like a cryptic pattern and led towards the door.
It was a warning from above, an unspoken sign that Tara had to accept her fate and stop messing around with this dark magic but Tara did not pay much attention to it. All she wanted to do was to escape, to run away from the truth.
Shattered, Tara felt the urge to prove the Witch wrong and decided to buy a deck of Tarot cards and take the destiny into her own hands.
Since then, every night once she came home from work, she would light up the candles, turn off the lights, shuffle the cards and lay them out on the carpet. No matter how many times she shuffled the cards or switched them around, every time she would get the same combination as the psychic did.
All those nights, Tara was fighting the fate, trying to outsmart the cards and get Paul back. She had no success and began to lose hope...until everything changed on the last night of summer.
She was alone in the room laying out the Tarot cards in a circle. To cheer herself up a little, she was singing a song she came up with about the same seven cards she kept on drawing from the deck:
"Making all These Sacrifices
Magician In The Night
The Two of Cups Is Reversed
Queen Of Swords, Overlord
Waiting On Judgment Day
I ain't God, but ya better pray
The Towers are Falling
And people are running
They say that the Moon and the Mo-"
Tara stopped singing. For a minute, she could not breathe and was lost for words. This time, she did not draw the Moon card like she always did before.
Instead, there it was - the answer to her obsession. The Lovers Card.
While she was staring at the card, contemplating what it meant, she heard somebody loudly knocking on the door.
Tara could feel her heart being ready to jump out of her chest. She was trembling all over her body.
"It's me," she heard the voice from the outside. It sounded so painfully familiar.
She went to open the door. It was Paul. The next thing she knew, he wrapped his arms around her, making her remember just how happy she was to be in his embrace again.
"I love you Tara," Paul whispered. "You are everything I need in this life."
(To Be Continued...)
Comments