Pink Flamingos

Fortune Telling

The tarot cards were tempting, but they seemed to provide more questions than answers. It seemed like everything was about love and adventure. Despite the growing fear that lived inside me, they couldn’t come soon enough.

Carefully replicating Mama Chelsea, I laid the same cards down on my bed that she had helped me pick out days ago. I stared at them, running my fingers over them and trying to understand what they meant. If only everything weren’t so vague, I thought to myself in annoyance.

The whole world was upside down and I was the only one facing the right way. Or maybe it was the other way around – I didn’t quite know, not that anyone else did. All I knew was that life had something in store for me but refused to reveal its hand quite yet. It left me feeling more and more frustrated with each passing day.

Where was this adventure? Where was this love? Everything seemed out of reach, floating ahead of me without ever quite allowing itself to be grasped or captured. I felt helpless, waiting for the future to pick me up and take me further down the road.

I traced the images on the cards and tried to imagine myself living the life that they showed me; the life that they predicted for me. I sat on the floor of my bedroom, kneeling in front of my bed, the sun filtering in through the window and peaking cautiously through the late curtains, just like Eddie apparently did from time to time. The plastic stars we had put up on the ceiling together were dull and gray in the daylight.

Closing my eyes, I imagined all the mischief I could get into. I imagined all the daring adventures, the journeys I would find myself a part of, the incredible stories I would get swept up in. Surely there had to be something more than the four walls of my bedroom and all the sentimental trash I kept in there.

My books, my dresses, my posters and everything in between couldn’t keep me sustained forever. I knew that well; I was hyperaware of it, if anything. I needed something more, something better.

My head was spinning. Everything seemed to be unfulfilling, unsatisfying. I couldn’t accept living and dying like it’s breakfast and dinner. “Where is love? Where is adventure?” I asked out loud, trying to take a page out of Mama Chelsea’s book and manifest the life I wanted.

But it wasn’t that easy, was it? Nothing ever was. I could never have everything I wanted to have or be everything – everyone – I wanted to be. I would die before I could even get around to trying. It all just made me feel sick and withdrawn from the real world.

I wanted to be a part of it all. Instead, I was apart – alone only because I forced myself to be. Silently, I closed my eyes and imagined myself as closer friends with Barbara, and how nice it would be to be around her more, and have her think highly of me.

Allowing myself to drift even further into my dreams, I imagined what it would be like to be Eddie’s girlfriend – sitting out with him and spinning records, listening to him sing along, looking at the “stars” with him and-

My eyes snapped open. “No,” I said to myself forcefully. “No, no, no, no!” Standing abruptly, I pushed the thought out of my head and shoved the tarot cards back into their packaging that I had left dangling haphazardly off the bedside table.

But I couldn’t help but leave The Lovers card out.