i have a psychic, she says i’m lonely, she says inside of me is turning out all wrong

It has been two years and one week now since I had the premonition that I was going to end up in Los Angeles before my twenty-sixth birthday.

Tonight, I was standing in the community crowd, dancing to the self-described “Los Angles ethnic makeup” band, and admiring the way the setting sun lit up the downtown Los Angeles skyline. That premonition is one of the most accurate predictions I could have had: Los Angeles has truly become my city, and I understand it and know it and love it better every day.
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I just got back from the Tofu Festival. Where I tried to see Ozomatli, but got admonished for blocking people’s views because I am TOO TALL to be at a festival where the majority of the goers are Asian and/or Mexican. I could see over everyone’s heads at the stage from the back, but made the mistake of trying to get closer to see better, resulting in the guilt-tripping by the short people.

This is just a weekend where I wish I was shorter. Usually, I like my height. It makes me stand out, makes me different, and enables me to help little old ladies get things down from high shelves at Trader Joe’s. I just wish I could be five-six for a week or so. Just to see what it’s like. Just so I could wear the 3 1/2″ spike-heeled boots I ordered off TJMaxx.com to wear out next Saturday and not look like a complete freak doing it.

But on the way out of the festival, a small woman of indeterminate ethnic origin came up to me and started telling me things. She was a psychic, and possibly even a real gypsy. She had a strong Brooklyn or Jersey accent, cafe-au-lait skin, and eyes even lighter than my own Eastern European hazel. She started saying things – and I had to listen. “You’re starting a great change in your career,” she said. “You have been deeply hurt in love, in a relationship that confuses you.” All general things, of course, and I said so. But then she started saying specifics. “A man with gray or salt and pepper hair will have an impact on your career. I see this when it gets chilly this winter. I see you changing jobs in the very near future.” And I stopped.

I let her do a Tarot reading on me, for the $15 I had left, out of curiosity. I can’t get my cards to line up this week; reading my own Tarot is like looking at a broken record, the same half-dozen general cards I’ve seen over and over for years. Yes, the Queen of Pentacles, the Two of Wands, the Three of Wands, the Five of Pentacles, the Nine of Cups. The Two Of Swords. I know them all, and they don’t have meaning anymore. I can’t read my own Tarot – and actually, I’ve never paid to have it read.

She put down the cards. And she was reading them. Standard Rider-Waite. But things began coming out. “You are a good person,” she said, “and you are always there for others. But when you have needed people, no one has been there for you.” She told me that the new job is a positive move, and will be very beneficial in the long run. That I will take a short trip this fall, three or four days, not far from home, and it will have a great impact on me. That There are three decisions coming my way, and I will make the wrong decision on one, but can avoid that by asking friends and family for advice.

I will receive bad news about my credit rating this fall. I am a woman of my word, a woman of honor. I have had a rough past year. I don’t feel like I’m eating or sleeping right, and can’t figure out how to get back to being as contented as I used to be. And while I am enjoying great success in my personal life and my career and my spirituality, the only thing wrong with me is in matters of love. And then she described, in eerie accuracy, the tale of my relationship with my ex-boyfriend.

Now, I realize this could well be a blanket statement. Most girls have The Relationship That Wouldn’t Go Away. Sex & the City wouldn’t have been half as popular if every woman didn’t have her Big. But it was still frightening. I felt like she’d reached into my chest and pulled out my heart; I felt like she’d pulled too much out of me to be grasping for the straws and details I always assume psychics use to manipulate their clients into believing. It’s easy enough to pull out a general statement that’s true for most of the population, but she just included a few too many specifics for me to dismiss it. I believe in the Tarot, in horoscopes, in meditation. I always have. Yet I don’t believe in paid psychics.

Then she told me, nothing is going to change. “You give out too much negative energy,” she said. “Everything else, you shine in, but to the opposite sex, you are very negative. You have been hurt and you project this. You work hard at relationships, but your efforts only intensify the negativity. You know this, and you have been trying to fix it, correct?”

I have spent the last few months trying to work on who I am, trying to brighten my own light, trying to learn who I am, so that I can stop projecting the confusion and negativity to the opposite sex. It has been a deliberate effort. And she somehow pulled that out of me.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I have been.”

“You can’t fix it,” she said. “I can fix it for you. I can do an aura cleansing, for fifty dollars. You’ll see things change within days.”

Now here’s the problem: I do not believe in aura cleansings. I don’t even believe in auras – I can tell when people project light and kindness, or when they project negativity and bleed others of light. But I do not believe in auras. Yet she hit too many specifics for me to ignore the possibility that something is wrong. Would I believe in a $50 aura cleansing enough to make it effective? Is it possible that this woman really is a psychic and it would work despite my skepticism? Should I just start looking for therapists now – and would therapy even fix this? What if there is something out of alignment in my spirit that does need to be realigned?

I think the fact that I’m even taking a psychic this seriously says that I have been in Los Angeles for too long already.