Day eight. The house party. The house party where your friends are the one percent. But not like the fancy one percent, like you legit know one percent of the people there. Even that is an exaggeration. I know three people at this party.
I walked in to a room of beautiful strangers all sitting on the floor of a home with ceilings too tall to fit in to one picture. Their eyes were fixated on a woman in a beautiful white dress, standing on the stairs, talking about the moon and it’s powers. A stack of tarot cards is handed around the room and I’m asked to take one. I pull the first card, turn it over, let my heart sink. “Stormy.” There’s a little boat on the roughest of waters illustrated on the card. I try to laugh this off, find the irony, but for some reason it bothers me. I am surrounded by people who have been promised better futures by a 3×5 sheet of card stock. Soulmate. Wealth. Fortune. These are the cards that surround me. I sit on the concrete stairs and stare at my card once more. Rough.
I turn my attention to 1/3 of my connections here. She is a vision in a pale pink sheer dress that let’s you see a bit of her skin. Her voice sings of the things that have gotten under it. She radiates beauty and talent and all things good. I get lost in the hour, her voice, her ability to navigate a crowd and the intelligence it requires. There are things bigger than me; this moment is one of them. Her voice echoes through the room, smoke slipping out of people’s lips and up towards the ceiling. Higher. Higher. “So many times I have waited for the storms to pass,” flows effortlessly from her lips and she points in my direction. She addresses me to the crowd by my first and last name and announces that I’ve pulled the stormy card. For a brief second, I feel publicly ridiculed. She sways with the music, the audience cheers, and she continues on. She comments that she loves storms. Suddenly I feel better. Epiphany seven.
playing with a full deck of cards.
When I was younger my mom’s boyfriend at the time would frequently use the saying, “not playing with a full deck of cards.” That someone wasn’t all there. A little bit crazy. Tonight I reveled in that. My stormy card was part of a deck, a whole. Stormy is just part of life. Yes, there is wealth and fortune and soul mates (I hope) but there are other darker parts that contribute just as equally. That contribute even more so. The people I admire the most are the people who have had to persevere. Who have had to endure things that they didn’t deserve. People who have had to steady the boat. Face the storm. Navigate.
My eyes were drawn back down to my card. Pride swelled in my chest; I held the card there. Storms are the best part. Storms teach you the most. Try to drown you. Remind you how much you love the taste of air. To play without a full deck of cards IS crazy, disillusions you from discoveries, robs you of the compare and contrast moments that life delivers to those deserving or not. Uncertainty is a beautiful thing.
I ventured through rooms of the home holding my card until my feet finally found the door. As I went to step outside she motioned for me to leave the card behind; I had forgotten it even existed. In the same way that I’ve disremembered storms I’ve carried in my heart, I forgot about the one that just an hour ago I cared about so deeply. These things become part of us; they help us grow. The waves crash in to our lives and then they settle, they add depth, fluidity.
Maybe deep down inside I didn’t want to leave my stormy behind; it was significant, metaphorical, beautiful, and calming. I set the card down as I stepped out of the door and in to the stillness of the street, the chaos of my mind. The perpetual tempest that I never want to treat took over and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
the length of waves 