Tag: Heal

Chapter Fifty-Two – 4 of Swords

by Jamieson Wolf, posted in A Tarot Guide, Finding Balance, Memoir, Someone Else’s Life, Tarot

I arrived back at Lisa’s with a broken heart.

Every breath I took into myself hurt and I wondered if this would be the way it was from now on. I dried the tears that had started again before I entered the house. I wanted to appear strong, but I knew that this would not last long. I’d resolved myself to the idea that tears were a sign that I was strong enough to cry. I just wished the tears would stop. I had cried all the way back to Lisa’s.

She seemed genuinely unsurprised to see me back so quickly. “Jamieson, you’re home early.”

I looked at her and saw her kind face and knew that I couldn’t keep it from her for any length of time. “Francis broke up with me.” I said, new tears sliding down my cheeks.

“I know, honey. I’m so sorry.”

That stopped me short, and I felt like I’d been slapped. “Why are you sorry?” Her words clicked into my head. “What do you mean, you know? What are you talking about?”

She patted the chair beside her and passed her pack of cigarettes towards me. I reached for the pack of cigarettes and pulled one out for myself. Getting up quickly, Lisa put the kettle on to boil. She was drinking coffee, but she drank it at all times of the day. She knew I liked a cup of herbal tea in the evenings. If she was brewing me tea, I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to hear what she was going to say.

She waited until the kettle was boiled and she poured the water into the mug. I could smell peppermint across the kitchen. Bringing the tea back to the table, she put the cup beside me and took my free hand in hers. “I know because we talked about it.”

“It meaning us? Like, Francis and myself?”

“Yeah, he’s been talking to everyone about his feelings for months now.”

“Months?” I felt the ground move beneath me. Looking down, I wasn’t surprised to see that the earth had opened up around me. If I looked too deeply into the earth, I could see the air moving within it and feel the wind on my skin. “What did you talk about?” I could barely get the words out. It felt like I was having to pull each word from my lips, the air to create them gone for now.

“Well, how young you were, of course. How he loved you but realized that he didn’t love you in the way you needed to be loved. There were so many years between you.”

“That didn’t matter to me!” I told her, letting out a puff of smoke. I watched it float to the ceiling to join the ether and wished that I could find a way to disappear so easily. “I knew he was having difficulty with it; he kept saying that I was only six years older than his son.”

“Then you see the problem. He already had two kids; he didn’t want a third one.”

Whatever words I was going to speak were slapped out of me. I closed my eyes and looked down at my heart which still bore the scars Francis had given me. I held my heart in my hands, and I cupped my hands around my heart to keep it safe. I would not let him hurt me. I kept my eyes closed when I spoke next. “Why didn’t he talk to me?”

“Because he didn’t want to hurt your feelings. He loved you in the beginning, Jamieson. But there was more than twenty years between the both of you.”

“That didn’t matter to me. I love him and never saw age when I looked at him.”

“Yeah, well he couldn’t overlook it.”

“Fine, but he should have talked to me about it. Who else did he talk to about breaking up with me?”

An uncomfortable look came over her face. “Everyone,” she said.

“Like, everyone we know? Define everyone. Like Darnelle and Sophie? Jen?”

“That’s a good start. But when I mean everyone, I mean anyone who would listen. He was so broken up about everything. It’s been going on for months.”

“But we’ve been together for months, almost a year.”

“He started talking to me about it soon after you got together. He loved you but didn’t know what to do.”

“Yeah, well, he certainly knew what to do when I was sucking his dick.” The words came out of my mouth unbidden. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.” She pushed my cup of tea towards me. “Francis is an asshole. He may be all flash in the pan and sparkles, but I still think that when you have a chance at love, you don’t start looking for excuses to take your heart back.”

I closed my eyes again and could see my heart. It looked whole again. There were cracks that ran along the surface, but it was still beating. I could get through this. I had to get through this. For a moment in the dark, I was beside Shades while he fucked a woman, and I opened my eyes so that I could let go of that memory. I was always giving my heart to the people who didn’t want it. Here I was having discovered what love could truly be and the magic it could create, but it had been a lie, too.

Lisa could sense where my mind was going. “He loved you, Jamieson. I’m sure of it.”

“Then why did he push me away?” I asked. Fresh tears slid down my cheeks.

“I think he was pushing himself away. Not that I’m playing devils advocate, but I can’t imagine what it was like for him to love you and fear you at the same time.”

I let out a laugh. “Why would he fear me?”

“Because you gave him the love that he’s always been wanted and that terrifies him. He doesn’t think he deserved it, so he runs away from it, hurting people in the process.”

I nodded and got up from the table. I took my tea and went out back, sitting down on the back stoop in the dark. I could see bugs surrounding the lamp by the door. I listened to the wind and the sounds of traffic and other people in the distance going about their lives, unaware that it felt like mine had ended.

In my minds eye, I saw myself holding my heart to my chest. I knew that what it needed was love and care. I couldn’t give my heart to another; I had to keep mine close and love it as much as I could. I would focus on loving myself, instead of loving others who could not love me back. I took the four shards of metal that had been left in my heart and gently pulled them free. I took the time to fashion a box around my heart that would protect it and keep my heart from harm.

I would give my heart the rest that it needed so that it would be able to heal in peace. It was the least I could do after everything that my heart had seen me through. I opened my eyes again and looked into the shadows, knowing that I had to find my peace after I had time to grieve.

I lit a cigarette and the smoke faded in the shadows much as I wished to do.

Chapter Fourteen – Temperance

by Jamieson Wolf, posted in A Tarot Guide, Tarot

After wandering for days with my mind, body and spirit split from each other, I decided to do what I could to bring them back together.

Sunshine could tell that I was still being affected by my mother, so he did what he could to draw me out of myself. I wasn’t speaking a lot, and I had forgotten that I was on a journey to find myself. I had stopped trying.

“Family is awful sometimes,” he said “They know how to hurt us the most. Why don’t you come and see my mom with me? It might make you feel better.”

I was a little shocked. “You still talk to your mom?”

“Yeah, of course I do,” Sunshine said.

I gestured at the concrete jungle around us, the people milling about on the streets too busy with their own tasks to acknowledge us. “But we’re here.” I said, as if that explained everything.

“Well, she let’s me live my own life, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have a relationship. When I get tired of being here, I can always go see my mother for an afternoon.”

“She let’s you live like this?” I was still hurting from what had happened with my mother, still not able to see on the other side of it.

“If you mean that she lets me live my own life, but she’s still there for me, then yes. She does.” He gave me a wink and a cigarette. “Come on, I’m taking you home to my mom. You need a hug.”

“You gave me a hug this morning.”

“Not the same and you know it.”

We took the bus to go see her. It felt like an extravagance, and I wondered when it would feel normal being in one world but coming from another.

On the bus, Sunshine and I sat in silence for a while, and I enjoyed the hum of the traffic and the sound of conversation. I tried to hear the music within the noise, the beauty within the racket, trying to distract myself from the torrent of water that still threatened to take me over. My emotions were all over the place and I found myself filled with sudden bursts of anger and shame. I tried to put that emotion into writing, to let the words flow from me, but they were stuck, too concerned with the fact that they might hurt someone else as much as I was hurting to come out onto the paper.

When we got to Sunshine’s mothers place, she greeted us at the door with a bright smile. She took me into a hug right away and it warm and comfortable. “Call me Sarah, everyone does, even this one.” She jerked a thumb at Sunshine. “You’d think he would have learned some manners by now.”

“I learned my manners from you,” Sunshine said with a smirk. Turning to me, he said “Don’t believe a thing she says. She’s lying.”

“Takes one to know one, son of mine.” Sarah looked at me, really took me in. “I’m sorry, but where are my manners? Come here, I want to give you a hug.”

“You already gave me one.”

“That was hello hug. Not a hug to help you heal. Come here, I won’t bite.”

“Unless you want her to,” Rainbow said cheekily. “I’m going to make a cup of tea, Do you want one, Jamie?” Not waiting for an answer, he went into the kitchen.

Sara wrapped her arms around me and this time, the hug felt different. It felt motherly and comforting. She held me while I cried, and I let the tears fall from my eyes. Sarah must have known that they were soaking into her shirt, but she didn’t stop hugging me. She said nothing, but made gentle noises while I cried and patted me gently on the back.

When the tears stopped, Sarah stepped back from me and held me at arms length. “There now, you look a million times better. You can’t hold on to all that sadness, Jamie. It eats you up. Instead, you have to make something from all those emotions.”

I shook my head. “My words keep getting stuck.”

“And so they will after a great upset. But you know what I believe? I believe that the greatest things are created when we’re full of emotions. Keep writing. Here,” She went to the kitchen and got a journal from a drawer. “I keep them around for Sunshine. He’s always writing something. Now you can, too.”

“Thank you, Sarah.”

“Never you mind. And don’t you worry, your mother will come around to the changes that are taking place for her, even as your whole world has changed. You’ll find each other again.”

“Mom, can I put brandy in my tea?” Rainbow asked.

“No you certainly can’t.” She slapped his hand as Rainbow reached for the bottle. “And don’t you worry, Jamie. I’ll be your mom for now.”

“Hey,” Sunshine said. “You’re my mother.”

“I have plenty of love to go around, I can be mom to both of you.”

“Fine, I’ve always wanted a brother anyways.”

We all sat with our tea, the steam coming from the cups, and I finally felt that I was going to be okay. I heard the water in me begin to rain and I wondered what would grow within me. As the rain continued, I flipped my new journal open to the first page and took hold of a pen, ready for the words to come.