Life Line

On psychic cartography

this piece was published in Navy Pen Literary Magazine for ISSUE 3: SONDER

“The Dove" | Sandra Bierman (1938)

I asked a psychic to read the story embedded in my palms and tell me what was written before I took my first breath. Before I was even a thought in my mother’s mind. I asked this psychic if I would be lucky in love. She told me I would be late in it. She said I had to heal the world with my hands first. I listened as she relayed words which neither soothed nor aggravated my inability to surrender to things as they were. While this psychic skimmed a jagged nail across my life line, and told me I would own a house one day, I shifted my eyes to the left and could make out her husband and toddler behind a sheer curtain which separated the living room from the bedroom. This psychic, she had 116 reviews on Google. That meant 116 people placed the weight of their lives in the hands of this clairvoyant cartographer. A cartographer who specialized in building an abstract railroad to the nirvana that is a life well-lived. How many worn palms had she seen? How many prophecies of a life cut short, or love unfulfilled, were caused by the simple fact of dissolved melanin? Was it possible that her hands, the hands that were anointed with the oil of manifest destiny, still held the script for hundreds of other lives? Was it possible that, when she told me to avoid men with certain names or anticipate relocation, her hands were still a home for someone else’s future? I sat on a semi-broken chair and placed my faith in someone who was prophetic, but had not foreseen reading someone who constructed her entire life on the promise of another’s words — my mother’s, my father’s, God’s. Someone who spent more time thinking about this psychic’s prior clients and the sheets they slept on, the color of their shower curtains, and the last person that made them cry. She had no way of knowing that I, too, was a psychic. Not one that mapped futures, but excavated histories. One that watched speech patterns, pleasure, and discomfort. One that sifted through the rot of tragedy endured and surrendered under the credo of “that is just life.” This psychic read my palms and preyed on a preternaturally engineered ecosystem of occurrences that had nothing to do with me. She held my hand, a hand meant to heal the world, and spewed regurgitations of patterned methods for survival. She did this and I paid respect to what she said for I was ignorant of the shape of my life. I believed that the hollow nature of her speech was attributed to the lulling monotony of her voice. I held her words as providence, something meant to cocoon the sanctity of my love, my career, and my life. I paid her $65 to deliver an uncertainty, one that might have belonged to another, because what else was I supposed to do? What could I have done with the tatters of someone else’s life?

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i did not believe in what she said at first, but…… she lowkey ate me right tf up everything she said would happen has happened, including the name predictions

lots of love,

jasmine <3