Five of Cups

Three years ago, on the night of the harvest moon, I pulled the Five of Cups from the witch's deck of tarot cards. She told me what I already knew.

G and I were in the French Quarter on Valentine's Day to see the parades. She wanted to see the fortune tellers with their crystals and cards, lined up at folding tables in front of the cathedral. I was blonde again that day, loose Goldilocks curls tucked under a snapback. G had her palm read by one of the ladies dressed in floral print garb. At first, I didn't want to partake in the fortunes, but in the end some feeling I can't quite describe made me sit down at her table.

Perhaps due to my external appearance, her palm reading was laughable. She told me I had a flair for drama, that I would likely have twins, that I had a tendency to go after the bad boys because I wanted to fix them, and that when I had enough of being a girl and was ready to be a woman, I should stop looking for a bad boy and find a good man. There were a few things she said that gave me pause, but considering the statistical odds of saying something remotely accurate, I was mostly unimpressed. But my interest wasn't in palm-readings. My fascination has always been with the cards.

The first card I drew was Death. Most people would shudder at the Death card, but I already knew what it signified. That rebirth and great change were on the horizon.

I was asked to draw ten cards, but an eleventh slipped out of the deck. The Four of Cups, the Five of Pentacles, the Six of Pentacles, the High Priestess, the Eight of Rods, the Seven of Rods, the Fool, and the Devil. But there were two more that gave me pause.

I'd kept a poker face through the entire reading, but when I drew the sixth card, I couldn't help but laugh out loud. There was the Lovers card, as if I needed a reminder of the thoughts that had been running through my head all day.

Then, there was the Five of Cups. My old friend.

#

When I saw my third-year roommate at the parade yesterday, he asked me how the date on Friday had gone. Normally, I consider myself a fairly articulate person, but every time someone has asked me about how Friday night went, I find myself eliciting a series of "I don't knows" and embarrassed silence. That was when he said to me, "You know, you're the chillest person I have ever met.... Correction, the chillest person I have ever met who isn't stoned. But I have never seen you stress out over anything except for this."

This, in fact, refers to the person who has knocked me into a cesspool of uncertainty. After two months of circling like two panthers, we finally went out for dinner on Friday night. When someone asks you how a date went, what criteria do you judge it by? Awkward silences, stilted conversations, bad food? There was none of the above, but when I went home, there was a strange feeling sunken in my chest.

My friends tell me I overthink things, that I take this too seriously, but the reality is that while I am generally relaxed about most things in my life, I cannot help but react this way to anything that could potentially upend my entire sense of being. And our interactions have all been completely foreign to me, and the unfamiliarity scares me. I have never had anyone pursue me like this--initiate all these text messages, pay for my dinner, walk me to my car almost twenty minutes away, give me a teddy bear he caught from a parade float. The attention is both baffling and flattering, and I have never been so uncertain of how to behave in my life.

Someone once said to me that it was better to be with someone more in love with you than the other way around, but I can't help but think about how off-balance I have felt in this situation. He has made his interest in me abundantly clear, yet I can barely eke out a series of "I-don't-knows" when others ask how I feel in return. I have studied him for two months and can delineate all the ways that our personalities are compatible and analyze all the ways he has treated me exceptionally well, but the part I cannot rationalize my way out of are the spilled cups splayed out before me. The all-consuming intensity I once lived and breathed on is a ghost that still haunts my memories, and the fact that I don't feel the same way now makes me wonder if my brain has overrun my heart.