clairvoyance

A Starbucks is a generic enough space, but a Starbucks nestled into the dead-space just inside the automatic doors of Target is far worse. Even the most cookie-cutter free-standing Starbucks is still pretending to be a neighborhood coffee shop with comfy chairs, maybe a fake fireplace, people studying and chatting. Inside Target, the illusion is gone. There is a case of pre-sliced cheese and ham and rotating lines of giant red plastic carts next to the coffee line. The pastry cabinet is mostly empty and those left are dry and crumbled, the cake-pops sagging on their little sticks. The only people sitting at the too-crowded tables are harried moms feeding cranky toddlers an emergency snack to get them through the groceries, or dads on awkward dates with their pre-teen daughters, munching away on cardboard pizza from the little microwave cafe a few feet away.

On Monday, I shouldn’t have been getting coffee anyway. I’ve been trying to give up mochas, but on days with exams and papers due (of which there have been far too many lately) I give into the temptation for some caffeinated chocolaty comfort far too easily. And with a midterm looming that evening, I found myself in line with the harried moms and gaggles of teenage girls asserting their independence through commerce. As I waited for my order to come up, motion in my peripheral vision caught my attention. In the middle of the empty seating area was an elderly woman, dressed all in black with slim silver bangles. Her hair was perfectly done, and her demeanor was that of a socialite, well and duly out of place in low-end corporate box store like this. Polite, but wary of engaging strangers as always, I sidled over within hearing distance and leaned towards her.

“I’m a psychic, you know!” she exclaimed in a half-whisper. I forced my face into neutral.

“Oh, really?”

“I’m a psychic, and I could see you standing in line there! You are different! I had to talk to you.”

I waited, not sure what you say to someone who calls you over with that declaration, much less a woman in her late seventies who looks as if she could out do your own socialite mother at a dinner party full of strangers.

“You remind me of my Jennie. She’s like you. I’ve never seen anyone who reminds me of her like you do. You look nothing alike, of course, but you … you are just the same as her. You … you are smarter than you are giving yourself credit for. You need to quit with that.”

“Um, thanks?”

“And you are a traveler, are you not? You are a traveler, I can see it! Africa is in your future. Be ready for it.”

“Yes, I do travel as much as I can.” But Africa? It’s not even on my bucket list. Galapagos, Mongolia, Goa … but Africa? Well, sure. Why not?

“Do you have children? I’m sorry I’m asking personal questions. But I’m a psychic, did I tell you? Are you going to have children?”

“No.”

“Well, anyway. You need to start writing every day. Every Day, do you hear me? Quit trying to write that book, and just write every day. The thing you need to write will come out of that. And you owe it to us all to get it out of you.”

The entirety of the interaction was, of course, much longer and more convoluted than I have represented it here. There were questions about the astrological signs of my parents “A Taurus and Aquarius … but who cooks dinner?!?” And my own “Oh, dear. Dear, dear.  A Gemini? That *is* problematic …” as well as repetition of several questions due to the onset of age related short-term memory loss. But the insistence on writing every day continued, as did the assertion of my status as a traveler.

From my early days in the conservative church, I was taught that psychics had real power, but that it was from a dark consort with demons or the devil himself. They were dangerous and looking to woo unsuspecting, weak individuals with their charms to bring them into the dark. On the flip side of that coin, a friend of mine, still deeply religious, has taken up tarot card reading under the auspices of religious prophecy. Now, as a rationalist, I have believed self-proclaimed psychics to be intuitives at best and tricksters at worst who manipulate the hopeless and gullible by spinning half-truths into webs of deception with no substance behind them at all.

Does that make me a hopeless and a gullible? I have never interacted with anyone claiming such direct supernatural insight, and have never looked to. Yet this strange old women, as riddled with dementia as she appeared to be, spoke things to me that I badly needed, or at least wanted, to hear. All unsolicited, all without any prior insight except whatever she managed to glean from my own half-patient standing in a generic line at a generic coffee shop in a generic box store with a bag full of avocados and cilantro.

And so I shall endeavor to write every day, even if it means this space becomes less polished for a time. Because if I’m opening up my soul to the devil, after all, it might be about damn time.