I'm reprinting "Solstice" because I got a weird idea for a story a couple weeks ago, and it brought me back to this story. I thought people might like it, and, should my fiction idea ever become something, would want to go back to the original.
Besides, I've never met anyone quite like my Augusta neighbors, Pete and Julie.
SOLSTICE
- Originally written in Augusta, Ga., on June 8, 1999.
When I told my neighbor Julie that my birthday was coming up, she became frantic. I've learned in the weeks that I've known her that it's never good when Julie, who's on the payroll for that psychic phone line with the infomercials, is visibly startled.
At the mention of my birth date, which I said passively to her and her fiance Pete, she sat up from her cushion, her eyes got wide, and she began grabbing at books in her apartment.
"A solstice?," she asked me repeatedly. "I don't believe this. Oh my God, it explains everything!”
Pete, her fiance who rolled his eyes at me when I called him “my pagan friend from down the hall,” just nodded at her with a smile on his face. He'd figured it out, too, I guess, but they weren't telling me.
"What?" I asked her. "What does it explain?"
She rifled through the shelves looking for some astrology guide.
I’m a Gemini-Cancer cusp. I’ve known this for a long time. I know this because it’s really irritating when your zodiac sign changes depending upon what newspaper you’re reading.
I’d never really thought much on it beyond that.
To Julie, though, it was a very big deal, the cosmic key to everything. And, as I said before, when Julie talks, I’m willing to listen. I’ve seen the girl move things with her mind. I’ve seen her give insight into things that most people don’t like to acknowledge. I know that part of it is just keen insight into people, but that’s not all of it.
Something about Julie’s way, with its moving crystals, beautiful sense of kindness and willingness to listen, her Renaissance fair clothes and Loreena McKennitt music, commands my respect. She knows when secrets are kept, and she knows when trouble is coming. And she’s much more personable than my Magic-8-Ball, which never gives me the right answers.
“With you, it’s going to be all or nothing,” she said, looking at the book. “You have tremendous potential for success, or you’re going to fail. There is no middle of the road.”
The moon was smack dab in the middle of Aquarius on my birthday, she said in awe to Pete, who just kept nodding. Several planets were also in alignment, thus throwing me into the category, I guess, of “celestially challenged” or something.
Julie told me that I would never be a good actor, always uncomfortable expressing my emotions. Pete, a gangly yet beautiful, funny guy, told me that my strengths lie as a writer.
The stars apparently indicate, among other things, that I have a strength at magic.
Pete and Julie looked at the book together.
“This explains everything,” she said again. “This explains the cerebral palsy, the abuse … and I thought my birthday was bad. This explains why everything with you is so frantic.”
Pete told me that my life was not going to be easy, that if I succeed it will be only through a lot of pain and struggling.
I just continued to lounge on their couch, asking things like, “Great, but what am I supposed to do with it?” and “Oh, is that what caused it?”
I wonder if the stars indicated that I was going to end up a smartass.
Still, I listened to what she said. I always listen when she talks about this stuff (even if I don’t end up following it).
Julie once told me that a beer stein owned by her father was dangerous, that it could gain control over you. When I held it in my hand, I felt it pulsate and tighten in my grasp.
Julie told me that there were dark things about someone I’ve met. She told me that it’s dangerous to hang around with him, that there are things some people don’t know about him. She was right, though I continue to speak to him.
Because of her predictions, which all seem to ring with some bit of eerie proof, I can’t say that I completely trust him.
I carry a polished stone in my pocket that Pete and Julie told me that I belonged with, that it beckoned me. I giggle it around in my hands sometimes when I get nervous. My therapist endorses my use of it. It’s always cold and fun to handle. It reminds me of the good luck charms I’ve had, the necklace with the Japanese coin, the little Mexican pouch that I kept for years.
Julie called me into her apartment at 2 a.m. some weekday to help her scare away some negative force. When I came in, she’d covered all the mirrors, and I, of course, asked why. She referred me to Pete, who kept talking about reflective surfaces as gateways of some kind, and he said bad things could pass through them. I kept asking questions of Julie, who told me that it’s best to remain blissfully ignorant of some things. I let it go.
I didn’t buy it that night, and I left their apartment after I spoke to the bathroom reflection and Julie told me not to do anything that might, I guess, de-hex the mirrors.
Her predictions and visions have not stopped her from having a rather difficult life. This is another, more pressing, reason why I listen to Julie.
Pete led me to believe the predictions may have fueled the difficulty. Pete loves her and knows her. When I asked him what it was like for her, he asked me, “How would you feel going through life without surprises?”
She and I are similar, I feel. We’re not quite certain how to fit in, not quite certain we want to. She’s better at indifferent nonconformity than I am.
Even she admits that psychic ability is mostly just insight into people’s true natures, the stuff they already know but are unwilling to admit to themselves. It seems as though it’s not clairvoyance, just keen attentiveness, that brings her what she knows.
I am a pompous man, unwilling to let go, and yet looking for some place to belong. Some days I write. Some days I sit at Julie’s with some crystals. Some days I’m funny. Most days I’m odd, intangible and indecipherable.
I asked Pete and Julie that night how many layers I had, though. They told me, “Not as many as you think.”
I know that I’m about to undergo another identity crisis, the one that will probably shape me more than the others have. I’ve known people to turn 23 and question everything they know, using it as a measuring stick. They question where they’ve been, where they want to go. They think of the time in their lives thus far as time wasted.
My friend Messina, for instance, turned 23, living in Pennsylvania with his parents, and turned 24 in Los Angeles with a different lifestyle and a whole new set of piercings.
I’m 22 for a couple more weeks. I’ve never been to Europe. I like my job well enough, yet I know something else that I’d prefer to do. I’m afraid I lack the nerve, that I’m just an ineffective dreamer. The age of 23 comes as put-up-or-shut-up time to some people, and that’s how I want to view my year, as a life-examining and life-altering experience.
By the time I’m 24, I know that I will be someplace different. I know that I will because it’s always been planned that way. Sitting in high school chemistry everyday with nothing to do besides play on a calculator, you subtract your birth year from the big 2000 just to see how old you’ll be. You do it over and over. You imagine what you’ll be like when the millennium comes.
In class, 24 seemed so far away.
Because of that, I want this time to be defining. This is a milestone. It was set a long time ago, either through typing on that calculator for fun or through things that Julie is more apt to believe in. I’ve wanted to get out, and I see this as the perfect time to start going wherever it is I’m going.
Finding that your moods, future and major life events were all determined by the alignment of some planets on the night of my birth, the longest day of the year, is a bit unnerving. It leaves you wondering how much of it is actually up to you, why no one told you something like this before. Usually, when someone gives me a prediction I don’t like, I try my damnedest to prove it wrong.
Apparently the solstice has left me with a hectic, yet promising life. The solstice also left me with a future that’s iffy. It is now up to me, regardless of what Julie or anyone predicts, to do what’s best for me, find the best route on the path forward.
The weekend I met Julie, she did a tarot reading. So when she continued her research on my birthday and telling me of the all-or-nothing possibilities, I kept throwing the results of the tarot reading back at her.
“The tarot cards told me that I was going to succeed, that everything will turn out fine in the end,” I said.
Pete just looked at me and smiled while Julie kept reading her book.
“Oh, but that doesn’t really mean anything,” he said. “In the course of the universe, everything will turn out fine in the end.”
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