A Soul in Denial Doesn't Realise It's Dead

Sometimes, we’re sent signs. Sometimes, we invent them. Who’s to say what’s what, and where do we draw the line? Claim it’s frequency or confirmation bias. Call it intervention, divine.

Nora hadn’t left the house with the occult shop in mind. She’d strolled down an unexplored road, its unturned cobble stones, and familiar yet novel sense of grey – new globs of phlegm and dry gum and cigarette butts and candy wrappers. A window of ribbons like serpent tongues. Bags in shop windows, shoes, handwritten price tags. A florist, potted plants on tree stumps. A tavern – cherry wood inside, glittering beneath cosy, warm lights. A fleeting glimpse of a stranger’s eyes catching a fleeting glimpse of her in turn. And then came a glass wall of crystals, a canopy of dreamcatchers hanging from the ceiling. Nora wandered in just as she had when she was little.

As a child, she’d always been drawn to the occult shop beside the news agency back home. Magnetic, it was, and her will was as light as a paperclip – entering the store had been an inevitability. While her parents redeemed lottery scratch cards, Nora had wandered through the clinking bead curtains, into the cloud of lavender incense, into the darkness and its singing Tibetan bowls. Crystals in glass cabinets, a bookshelf of grimoires, black mood rings on purple velvet, and a mechanical crystal ball in which you could insert a $2 coin in exchange for your fortune (but not even this blatant commercialisation had detracted from its humming allure). And the woman behind the counter always flaunted a long, flowing skirt, her fingers sprinkled with stones like a Mancala board, swirling rings like Van Gogh’s Starry Night. How old had she been? An adult, a woman – she very well could have been twenty-eight, like Nora herself.

But in this occult shop, on this unknown road, the woman wore a T-shirt. Beetlejuice. Her fingers bare, save for a dainty band on her ring finger. There was no bookshelf, no grimoires, but boxes upon boxes of incense, suncatchers hanging from the ceiling, sparkling dewy like raindrops in the faint light, and a glass cabinet filled with tarot decks. She wanted that one, right there – yellow, black and white, as loud as caution tape.

Nora left the store with her first ever deck of tarot cards: Rider-Waite. It carried that impalpable weight of a passport, a cheque, or Charlie’s golden ticket. It felt like a jewel gleaming from within the darkness of her purse, like a shrunken lighthouse emanating invisible beams of light, guiding someone or something toward her shore.

*

The first reading Nora ever gave herself was a three-card layered spread on love, which rightly suggested she was defensive and guarded (Seven of Wands, Four of Pentacles) – perhaps overreactive when it came to asserting her boundaries. She was also rash and impulsive in love, jumping to conclusions; or, perhaps, too forthcoming with her feelings, thereby pushing others away in pursuit of connection (Knight of Swords). With a fresh perspective (Ace of Swords), however, and a newborn openness and curiosity (Page of Swords), she’d be able to recover from the mental anguish of hitting love’s rock-bottom (Ten of Swords). Completion – the worst was behind her.

Now, hold this last card in your mind: black sky, ten swords protruding from the back of an individual lying dead on bloodstained sand. Nora’s desk lamp and its sunset glow illuminated the glossy, twinkling card. She’d been that very individual a year and a half ago when she’d lost her mind in love. Trying to reconcile the irreconcilable—the man who yelled with he who caressed; her soulmate with her abuser—was like sticking needles in her ears, in her nostrils, and jamming them into her brain. Mad and braindead, she’d been, her soul her only guide. And finally, after all this time, there was recognition of what she’d suffered – recognition in the sombre illustration on a mere paper card. It was more acknowledgement than any human being had offered her, and she allowed herself to believe, for an instant, that it was divine omniscience. She’d drawn these cards because something knew, somehow. Or, who knows, maybe she hadn’t properly shuffled the deck.

           The second reading was on self-development.

The third on career which predicted emotional fulfilment (Ten of Cups), recognition and clarity (The Sun), and steady but worthwhile progress (The Eight of Pentacles). The Sun, it was the first ever Major Arcana card she’d ever drawn.

The fourth—which struck her in the middle of the night as she lay in bed—was a reading on her past relationship. Her eyes shot open, she threw off her duvet and the wheels of her desk chair rippled through the night like a pebble dropped steadfast into a pond. Nora switched on her lamp and thoroughly shuffled the cards, dividing the deck into quarters. Shuffled each quarter. Divided them again. Inverted cards, too, for reverse readings. Another layered three-card spread.

Her past relationship had been characterised by emotional imbalance and discordance (Temperance reversed), reckless behaviour and impulsivity (Knight of Wands reversed). But the promise of fulfilment (10 of Pentacles) had blinded her – she’d “known” he was the one. Plot twist: he wasn’t. Hence the disillusionment (Eight of Swords reversed) and liberation from the sparkling shackles that had bound her to the fantasy, his – an alternate world in which he was kind, and successful and deservedly revered. It had ended with urgent, reparative self-love and nurturing (The Empress) and yet, somehow, Nora was never able to entirely let go, never able to believe that it wasn’t what she’d thought it was, that it wasn’t love and never had been. I mean, a year and a half later, and she was drawing JUDGEMENT reversed: delayed awakening and rebirth. She was still on the edge of existence, still flirting with the demarcation line between the living and the dead. It was odd to walk about while her heart rotted in her chest, to kiss others with her worm-ridden tongue. She’d very well died, Nora had, but she hadn’t reincarnated. (In folklore, it’s said that a soul in denial doesn’t realise it’s dead). Nora still couldn’t believe that the love of her life was only, for lack of a better term, an abusive loser.

*

When Nora was little, she’d had a turquoise dreamcatcher. Turquoise velvet, brown feathers. She’d believed it caught her nightmares like bugs in a spider’s web. That was before the world spat on her and said magic wasn’t real. But it had been – it had been for all of us. What made us grow out of magic? And no, it’s not that we grew up, because what isn’t magical about quantum entanglement, or the heart’s EMF, or clear quartz in timekeeping? What isn’t magical about brainwave entrainment or moon tides? about time slowing down near a black hole, or a black hole itself? And what isn’t magical about all this unfathomable complexity that functions (against all odds!) like clockwork? People have forgotten that we don’t know anything, and those who know a smidgen less than nothing, i.e. physicists, are in awe of the mystery of it all. Common people stick up their noses at magic as though orbiting and being orbited by celestial bodies isn’t an enormous, nonsensical miracle, unfathomably ridiculous in that it does, in fact, make sense.

           And so, Nora welcomed the signs, and so what? Everything she’d ever achieved in life, she’d first invented. And whatever sign she’d dreamt up had become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and is that not magic, too? And maybe we’re projecting, but even that’s a relief, for it implies our lives are so rich with meaning that any draw of cards makes sense. Whether or not the signs were real (what is “real,” anyway?), this thought alone was comforting. Nora’s world, her life, was soaked with emotion and experience – it wasn’t the void it often seemed to be but the overflowing and dripping contrary.

And what was so wrong about introspection? Reading your cards was accompanied by that holy midnight silence one feels when watching the ocean or boarding a plane. It demanded interpretation, reflection. A quiet internal dialogue that buzzes, somehow, as though the cards were pollen, our minds bees. You see, sometimes we’re sent signs. Sometimes, we invent them. And sometimes, we need only be prompted into action.

JUDGEMENT reversed – it was simply time for Nora to move on. And sure, maybe she’d needed a pretty scrap of cardboard to remind her. Hold it in your mind: grey figures, souls, rising from their coffins to the trumpet call of an angel.